


B.S. at Blandings

by T Verano (t_verano)



Category: Blandings Castle - P. G. Wodehouse, The Sentinel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-30
Updated: 2016-04-30
Packaged: 2018-06-05 07:16:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6694789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/t_verano/pseuds/T%20Verano
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Like it says on the tin, B.S. at Blandings. Blair Sandburg (and Jim Ellison) at Blandings Castle, that is. Or, if you prefer, change the 'B.S.' to 'BS' and… well, there you have it; the story summed up in a nutshell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	B.S. at Blandings

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the marvelous Sallymn as a long overdue (long, so long, so very very long overdue) Moonridge fic. I cannot begin to express enough thanks for her patience and forbearance (this started out so long ago to be a different story entirely; several different stories, in fact, and none of them even thinking about Wodehouse).
> 
> I also cannot express enough thanks to Caarianna for beta'ing the fic, to Kernel1 for running the Wodehouse-related bits through her Wodehouse-lover's eyes, and to Suemc for helping me with some vexing "who addresses whom how?" types of British and peerage-related questions. All of them helped me more than I can say, and Caarianna and Kernel1 helped me with both minor and major issues (and helped me have the courage to tackle the major ones). Any errors you may find have wandered in during my revisions and belong solely on my shoulders.
> 
> For the reader: It might be useful to know that although the fic mentions several Wodehouse-world events, it's not meant to fit into any specific Blandings Castle time line. Also, because Wodehousian logic is my favorite kind of logic, I wrote this with an intention of it being completely logical that Jim and Blair in their mid-1990's selves could seamlessly visit Wodehouse's world in its perfect timeless… time, as it were. 
> 
> Note: this is not one of those crossovers that can blithely advertise "You don't really need to know the other fandom." If you don't know Blandings Castle and Wodehouse in general, you'll probably find this fic to be a baffling irritation (which you may find it to be anyway :-)).
> 
> It feels almost sacrilegious to have attempted to hang out at Blandings for a little while like this and I know that I didn't do Plum anywhere near the justice he deserves, but the fic ended up being a ridiculous amount of fun to write.

**Prologue**

"Forget something, Chief?" 

Jim's quiet voice sounded deceptively forbearing, the way it always did when Jim considered himself to have been done wrong by, but that was nothing new. Blair didn't bother to glance up from the notes he was jotting down. Wentworth Birtwistle, Second Viscount Altenborough. Man. This was a little difficult to process… 

"Sandburg." That was less forbearing, if still quiet. Even Jim didn't like to be shushed by Leonard, who ruled his shift in the reference section at Rainier's Melvin Edwards Memorial Library with an iron fist gloved in ball-bustingly silky sarcasm. Blair sighed and looked up. 

What was Jim doing here, anyway? Blair was supposed to be picking him up, and not for hours yet, not until… Oh, crap. Unless either an apocalypse or one hell of a storm had suddenly slid in out of nowhere, it wasn't afternoon any longer; the windows behind Jim were sort of dark. 

Actually, a _lot_ dark. Kind of like Jim's expression as he loomed over the table Blair was sitting at, with his eyebrows lowered and his jaw tense and his arms crossed — darkly — over his chest. Crap squared. 

"Forget something, like coming by the station before five," Jim's eyebrows lowered even further, along with his voice, "and driving me over to Lou's so I could pick up Sweetheart?" 

"Oh, hey, it's after five, huh?" Blair said, with as much nonchalant innocence as he could inject into the words. 

"'After five' — it's eight-thirty, Sandburg." 

Eight-thirty? "You can't be serious," Blair protested. "It can't be eight-thirty." Well, okay, it could be, apparently. At least according to Jim's watch, which was now flaunting the time about three inches from Blair's nose. Darkly, if that was possible. 

"Eight-thirty," Jim went on, "and Friday, and that means I can't get my truck back from the shop until Monday. _Monday._ " He looked like he wouldn't mind pulling out his handcuffs and cuffing somebody. Somebody like Blair. And not in the fun, kinky kind of way. "I could've gotten a ride from Brown if I'd known you weren't going to make it in time, or called a cab. But no, you'd promised to pick me up, and like an idiot I waited for you. By the time I realized you weren't going to show, there'd been a run on cabs in the area, and it took me over half an hour to track a free one down and get over to Lou's." A muscle at the side of his jaw jumped, like he was grinding his teeth. "Five minutes too late to do me any good." 

Blair groaned, under his breath in deference to Leonard. Jim wasn't very fond of riding in taxis at the best of times. Getting him to agree to the plan now, on the heels of having had to trek around the city this evening in cabs and on top of the prospect of being Sweetheartless for the weekend, was going to take some extra finesse. 

Still, Blair had this covered. He cleared his throat and gave Jim a conciliatory smile. "Sorry, okay? You can borrow the Volvo this weekend if you need to go anywhere." 

"Wrong," Jim said. "I _own_ the Volvo for the weekend." 

Blair looked at Jim incredulously. There was conciliation and then there was lunacy, and there wasn't any question which side of the fence turning the Volvo over to Jim for the whole weekend would fall on. It was risky enough to offer to let him borrow it for an hour or two. Even if Jim just ran out to pick up his dry cleaning, some halfwit would undoubtedly decide to rob We Care Cleaners, 'Drop Your Pants Here,' at that particular moment, and in the resulting car chase the Volvo would end up airborne at least seven times, with its windshield taken out by an RPG and the grille smashed in from some up-close-and-personal with an oncoming big rig that Jim hadn't been paying any attention to, despite the fact that he'd been driving in the wrong lane straight towards it. 

"Oh, no. No. No way," Blair protested — a shade too vehemently, since his protest earned a glare from Leonard. He made an effort to lower his voice again. "I lost track of time, sure, but you're not getting my Volvo for the whole weekend. It was only a couple of hours, and I said I'm sorry. Geez." 

Jim leaned down towards Blair's head and whispered menacingly into his ear. "First I figured you must have been kidnapped, Chief, since you wouldn't forget me. Then I figured you'd needed money for gas and had stopped at an ATM to raid my account and gotten mugged. And then I figured your bucket of scrap metal had broken down by the side of the road and left you stranded." 

He put a hand on Blair's shoulder and squeezed, not exactly supportively. "And when I finally track you down here, I find that none of those — understandable — things have happened; you're just _reading,_ " Jim closed the three-inch-thick book closest to Blair's notebook so he could see the cover, "reading… What the hell? _Debrett's Peerage & Baronetage? _Peerage? _Baronetage?_ And _this_ was more important than keeping me from losing ten years off my life imagining all the reasons you didn't show to pick me up?" The hand on Blair's shoulder squeezed a little harder. "Important enough to keep me from having Sweetheart all weekend?" 

Regardless of the threat to the Volvo, and possibly to his shoulder, Blair couldn't help but grin at his partner. "Actually, it was. Is. Jim, wait till you hear." 

Jim didn't look even mildly intrigued. Of course he didn't. 

Okay, time for some strategic bribery. Blair lowered his voice to a level nobody but Jim should be able to pick up, even the voyeuristically vigilant Leonard. "I'll make it up to you about Sweetheart. I promise. _Really_ make it up to you." He batted his eyelashes at Jim (if only briefly, in case anybody was looking) and let his gaze travel meaningfully over Jim's body. 

And hey, if bribing Jim to go along with the plan also happened to safeguard the Volvo by keeping Jim busy in bed all weekend, Blair would absolutely be down with that. Nothing wrong with multi-tasking, right? 

Despite Blair's promise, Jim's eyes were still narrowed in pissed-off self-righteousness. Fortunately, that wouldn't last long; no way could Jim resist forty-eight straight hours in bed with a couple of cans of Reddi-wip, one of the peacock feathers Blair kept on hand in his former bedroom, and the six oversized black silk bandanas they stored in Jim's underwear drawer. Blair ran his tongue across his lips, making sure he had Jim's full attention, and mouthed, "Reddi-wip." 

Jim flushed. 

_Bingo._ Jim would be complete and mindless putty in Blair's hands long before Sunday evening, in plenty of time to make the reservations for the plane tickets. 

Blair shifted a little in his seat, partly because he wasn't exactly immune to the Reddi-wip idea himself, not to mention the thought of those bandanas, but mostly because he couldn't wait any longer to _tell_ Jim, whether Jim was entirely ready to listen yet or not. 

"Jim, you'll never guess," he said, rifling through the sprawl of books and papers on the library table and pulling out the heavy, cream-colored linen envelope from underneath one of the books he hadn't gotten to yet. "Look!" He waved the envelope at Jim. "Naomi didn't know, you know? Not until she met up with this guy by chance. They both signed up for some kind of holistic thought processes and dharma study residential program in Wales, and they started talking, and apparently he's a major genealogy buff and he has some Sandburgs in his family tree, right? It turns out Naomi's mother's grandmother married Nigel's great grandfather, who was a member of the peerage — which is the point behind the _Debrett's_ — and anyway, we're related!" 

The lethal expression on Jim's flushed face didn't change. "I'm happy for you." 

Blair rolled his eyes. Maybe he'd better buy three cans of Reddi-wip instead of two. But he shouldn't be surprised at Jim's lack of enthusiasm so far; Jim hadn't heard the best part yet, only the set-up, and he should've known Jim wouldn't be impressed by the unlikely conjoining of Sandburgs with members of the British peerage. Okay, maybe the conjoining itself wasn't totally unlikely, considering, but _legal_ conjoining? That was a whole lot less likely. Considering. 

But he was getting distracted. He thumped Jim lightly on the arm. "It gets better, man. I mean, it's not like I know that much about Naomi's family, since she's always been more into living in the moment, not tying herself down with the past. And it's not like Robert's my real cousin or any of the guys who were my uncles were really my uncles. But now I have a real relative, apparently a whole bunch of real relatives, and even weirder than that, it turns out I'm second cousins once removed to an _earl."_

He ignored the sound of a throat being cleared somewhat pointedly across the room — Leonard needed some excitement in his life, anyway — and thumped Jim's arm again. "And Jim, get this: we've been invited to go stay with them! I don't know what Naomi said to get you invited too, since she doesn't know we're _living_ together living together, so it's not like where you have to invite the wife if you invite the husband or you get Emily Post breathing down your neck. But whatever Mom said, we're both invited. And she has a ton of frequent flyer miles we can use, and the semester's almost over, and Simon's always ragging you about not taking enough of your vacation time. And it's a _castle,_ Jim. I mean, seriously unequalled opportunity to check out a vanishing subculture, except with all the modern conveniences. No jungle, no bugs, no lizards. Indoor plumbing. Butlers and things. And look," Blair waved the envelope at Jim again. " _Look._ An invitation. We _have_ to go, Jim. She sounds really nice." 

Jim was staring at him with something that looked a lot like disbelief. After a moment he shook his head sharply, like he would rather be thinking about Reddi-wip. "She?" he asked, and then immediately shook his head again, like the question had been forced out of him against his will. 

"One of my second cousins once removed," Blair answered, turning his most beseeching eyes on Jim. "Lady Constance Keeble." 

  

**Blandings Castle. Monday night.**

"Can we go home now?" Jim said as he shut the door of his room, apparently known as the Green Room (which seemed fair, since a lot of it _was_ green) behind them. Blair's room should therefore have been called the Disturbing Amounts of Some Weird Salmon-y Color Room, but it had wisely settled for the simpler East Room. Far East, to be more accurate. Too Far East, since it was about six miles away from the Green Room, at the end of a dauntingly long hallway. 

Jim's scowl was edging up towards eight or so on the ten-point scale, and Blair sighed. He'd figured petulance would make an appearance at some point during their visit, but not on the very first day. How could Jim be whining about wanting to go home already? Okay, moot question, this was _Jim._ It just meant that Blair was going to have to start petulance-proofing him ahead of schedule. 

Or, as the natives would pronounce it, 'shedule.' God, this was cool. For a Sandburg, anyway. At least for a Sandburg whose anthropological studies had so far been more of the "Let's have iguana for dinner" and "Hey, don't bother to dress; no, really, we mean that" sort. Which was also cool, but he had _roots_ here, roots that related him to a castle, in a manner of speaking. That added a totally new and personal level to the whole 'cool' thing. 

"I'm serious, Sandburg. Can we go home now?" 

Blair rolled his eyes. "Jim," he said firmly. 

Jim yanked at his tie. "Look, you've seen your sub-culture, toured your ancestral castle, met your relatives. Enough's enough." 

_"Jim."_

"I'm warning you, Chief, two weeks of this and — mmmph…" 

After a minute or so Blair pulled back reluctantly, before his preemptive kiss could turn into anything more involving. Not that kissing Jim wasn't pretty outstandingly involving in and of itself, but there were bigger issues to deal with. 

Well, not _bigger,_ nothing was more important than Jim and him, together, but no way were they going back to Cascade even a day early, and having Jim pout the whole time they were here would be a bitch. 

Jim didn't agree about ending the kiss so soon, apparently. He stepped back into Blair's personal space with a familiar gleam in his eye, a gleam that instantly sent all of Blair's blood flowing in the right direction. No, wait: the _wrong_ direction, at least at the moment. Bigger issues, Blair reminded himself resolutely. Petulance-proofing. A _plan._

"Later, okay?" he said, fending Jim off by retreating behind a tall wingchair that looked like it would feel perfectly at home in a throne room, if thrones were upholstered in dark green velvet and had needlepoint pillows lounging around in their seats when the seats weren't otherwise occupied. 

"Why not now?" Jim sounded reasonable, although he was eyeing the wingchair like he didn't give a damn about its dignity and might decide to vault over it at any moment. "I put up with dinner tonight, didn't I? I deserve a little consideration here." 

"It wasn't _that_ bad," Blair said. It hadn't been as fun as poker night with the guys or even on par with falling asleep in front of a Bonanza marathon, stretched out on the couch with his head in Jim's lap, but it'd been interesting, if probably only to him. "And anyway, Lady Constance is crazy about you, so why you're being so pissy about —" 

"That's another thing," Jim interrupted. "She doesn't like you." 

"No, she doesn't, does she? I don't exactly seem to be her cup of tea for some reason. But she does like you, _Mr._ Ellison," Blair grinned at Jim. "In spite of you being a cop, which I gather is about a minus two on her social success scale and a blot on your curriculum vitae that she's graciously decided to ignore." 

"She does _not_ like me. She likes the fact that my father's got money and hobnobs with the mayor and a couple of state senators." Jim aimed an irritated look at Blair. "Why you had to slip that into the conversation —" 

"We were dying there, Jim; that lorgnette of hers ought to be registered as a deadly weapon, seriously. And I was curious: implied financial and political status versus perceived occupational status. I was testing a theory." 

"I didn't appreciate it, Chief." 

"Okay, okay, chill. But try to go with the flow, all right? It'll make things a lot easier while we're here, and it's not like it matters any. Your dad really _is_ kind of rolling in it, after all, and who cares if she's got the wrong idea about you and him and his money and his political connections?" 

" _I_ care." 

"Come on, Jim. Please?" Blair abandoned his defensive wingchair and closed the distance between him and Jim, trying to look irresistible. 

Which, fortunately — if unsurprisingly; Blair knew his own strengths — worked. Jim frowned, but he cupped Blair's jaw in his hand and starting tracing Blair's lips with his thumb. His eyes were gleaming again despite the frown. "I'm going to be bored out of my skull in this hellhole, Sandburg." 

"No, you're not," Blair said, and sucked Jim's thumb into his mouth. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still Monday night.**

"At least my room's nearby. Sort of," Blair said absently. "Relatively. Well, not nearby at all, but in the same zip code. No, wait — 'postal code.'" Jim's fingers were messing around in his hair, and he leaned back a little further into Jim's touch. 

Unfortunately, it was drafty sitting at floor level, even with his back tucked between Jim's still fully pants-covered legs, and his butt was getting chilly despite the needlepoint pillow he'd shoved underneath it. It was that more than discretion that made him add, "I guess I should go." Not that he wanted to. 

The fingers tightened in his hair. "Unh-unh. I'm not spending my nights alone. That's non-negotiable, Chief." 

"There's always my cousin Penelope; my sixth cousin, if I've got it right. The two of you would make a charming couple. I'm pretty sure Lady Constance would be happy about it, too," Blair said, grinning to himself in remembrance of Lady C.'s discreet and repeated efforts to get something rolling between Jim and her niece, efforts that had started about sixty seconds after Blair mentioned Jim's dad and Jim's dad's money. 

Jim's fingers abandoned Blair's hair and cuffed him lightly on the back of the head. Blair grinned more widely. "You have to admit Penelope's pretty hot," he continued. "And rich, I guess, or she has rich relatives, and apparently she's on the market. And she has red hair. You could do worse — _ow._ Stop that." 

The hand that'd just thumped him on the back of the head again dropped to Blair's shoulder and started massaging his neck. "Then stop talking crap." 

"She does seem to be kind of down in the dumps, though." 

Jim sighed, but he didn't stop rubbing Blair's neck. "She's been staying here for a week, Sandburg. Seven days. Who could blame her for being depressed?" 

Blair tilted his head and let it drop backwards and down. It gave him a nice view, even if upside down, of Jim's mildly exasperated face. It also let the back of his head have contact with Jim's lap, and he pushed in closer and rolled his head back and forth a couple of times, evoking a grunt from Jim. 

"Man, you have a short memory. I promised you wouldn't get bored, remember?" He pressed down harder with his head. 

Jim grunted again. Or maybe it was more of a groan. "Just keep reminding me, Chief." 

"You got it," Blair said, looking up at Jim's face. It really was a nice view. Especially with Jim still in his fancy dinner suit. Jim without a suit, without any clothes on at all, was even better, of course, but this way he matched the chair in sartorial splendor, even if Jim's upholstery was black wool and the chair's was green velvet. With fringe. And tassels. 

Still, there was a certain lack of parity in the situation. "How come you still have all your clothes on, and I'm sitting here in my shorts, freezing?" 

"Beats me," Jim answered. "Last thing I remember is you pushing me down into this chair and getting down on your knees and reaching for my fly." 

"So you're saying I blew your mind." 

Jim's groan was less appreciative this time. Okay, it _was_ a terrible pun. 

Blair snagged Jim's wrist and looked at his watch. _Ouch._ "I should go." 

"Nope. You're staying; you are not abandoning ship here, Sandburg. Why do you even want to?" A thread of petulance had crept back into Jim's voice. 

"We talked about this. Discretion, Jim." 

"We're far enough from Cascade; why should we care? As long as we don't rub our hosts' noses in it, that should be good enough." 

"Uh-huh. Good enough until Lady Constance happens to mention how extra-special chummy you and I are to Naomi's holistic-thought-processes buddy Nigel, and he happens to mention it to Naomi, and the shit hits the fan. You know this isn't a good time to tell her about us." 

"I can't believe you're afraid of your mother. Naomi's always been so —" 

"Relentless? Sure she's right? Ready and able to generate a sizable and very vocal grassroots movement at a moment's notice for any cause that appeals to her? You know how pissed off she currently is at cops as a species — we could end up on CNN, Jim. If I end up on CNN, I don't want it to be because my mother's organized a protest march against my love life." 

"She wouldn't do that." 

"You don't know her as well as I do. Not getting arrested at the rally in D.C. last month when everybody else on the organizing committee ended up in the slammer really ticked her off. She lost face." Blair sighed. "We'll tell her, okay? But not now. Not until she gets over her current knee-jerk aversion to anyone whose professional motto is 'To Serve and Protect.'" 

Jim frowned. "All right, Mr. Paranoid, we'll be discreet. I'll kick you out just before dawn and you can go back to your room then. That's discretion enough." He slid his hand down Blair's chest and started toying idly with Blair's nipple ring. 

Maybe he had a point. 

His other hand curled lightly around Blair's ear, his fingers tracing the curve until they reached Blair's earrings and started in on some upper-level idle toying. 

A good point. A worthwhile point, a… very important… _nnnnh…_ point… 

Discretion was probably overrated, anyway. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Tuesday morning.**

"So, what did you guys talk about?" Blair watched as Penelope headed inside through the library's French doors. Although 'drifted inside' seemed more accurate: sort of like a gloomy, gray (albeit red-headed) cloud moving listlessly across the sky, trying to decide whether or not to rain. The mid-morning sun seemed to breathe a sigh of relief at her departure and started to shine even more brightly. 

Okay, that had to be Blair's imagination. But clearly, even a romantic stroll around Blandings' over-the-top rose garden with the supposedly rich and eligible Mr. Ellison hadn't cheered his cousin up. 

He turned towards Jim as Penelope disappeared from view, only to find Jim's eyes glued to the spot where she'd last been visible. "Jim?" he said, nudging Jim's side with his elbow. "Hey, Jim? What did you guys talk about?" 

"Huh?" Jim unglued his eyes from the library windows and looked vaguely back towards the rose garden. He shrugged. "Oh. Uh… I don't really know, exactly." 

"Roses? The weather?" Blair grinned. "What a toppingly brilliant wedding Lady Constance would throw for the two of you?" 

"'Brilliant? _'Toppingly?'"_ Jim sounded irritated. Which was slightly weird, since if he was going to be irritated by anything in Blair's question, Blair would've thought it ought to be the word 'wedding.' 

"Native dialect," Blair said. "And not really the point." 

"I told you, I'm not sure what she was talking about." Jim shrugged again. "Some garbage about the roses. I was too busy trying to keep my eyes from watering and trying not to sneeze to pay much attention." 

"I warned you to keep it dialed down." 

"You think I didn't? Keeping everything dialed down is the only reason I'm still alive. That garden is a menace." 

"I think Lady C. looks on it more like it's a lover's lane or something." Her transparently purposeful suggestion that Jim might like to tour the garden in the company of the lovely Penelope (exclusively in the company, even though Lady Constance hadn't put it quite that bluntly) had had Blair stifling a grin half an hour ago. 

"Lover's lane… Huh," Jim said, scratching the back of his neck. "Penelope did mention love, come to think of it." 

"Wait a minute, what? She did? She made a move on you?" Blair wasn't sure whether he was more amused or indignant. Not that Penelope knew Jim was taken or anything, but it was the principle of the thing. 

Jim's brow furrowed. "Dunno. She said love was only for children and fools, because all men were… uh, spineless worms. I think. Then she said maybe she wasn't being fair, maybe it was only British men. Something about love not being necessary or happiness possible, that people have to settle for being practical." 

That didn't sound too romantic as far as romantic moments went. It certainly didn't do much in aid of Lady C.'s presumed marital machinations, at any rate. Not that Blair was worried; Jim had traded in the Penelopes of the world for him (with a few cans of Reddi-wip thrown in) months ago, and Penelope — and Lady Constance — didn't stand a chance. 

Jim scratched the back of his neck again. "It was depressing as hell. I told you last night, Sandburg, she's been staying here too long. This place sucks the life out of a person." 

Blair sighed. "Give it up, man," he said, thumping Jim on the arm. "We're _not_ leaving early." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Tuesday afternoon.**

"Unbelievable," Jim said. 

Blair could only agree. "Maybe they like home-grown bacon?" He frowned, staring at the very large and extremely well-rounded pig. His occasional, spiritually-induced forays into non-omnivorous enlightenment had always been pretty brief, sure, and you got used to practicality in local food-provisioning attitudes when you were in the field or you didn't last long as an anthropologist. But something about knowing your food socially before turning it into breakfast… well, that was always easier with, say, grubs than with vertebrates. 

Okay, _sort_ of easier. Emotionally easier, although the part where you actually had to put the grubs in your mouth and eat them was harder to pull off with insouciance than it probably was to eat a BLT even if you'd known the pig personally before it became the B nestling greasily on top of the L and the T and underneath the mayo. 

"Here's your chance to ask about the bacon," Jim said, nodding his head across the lawn towards an approaching figure. 

Blair watched for a moment before whispering, "Jim, he's _pottering._ I never thought I would use that word about somebody just walking across the yard, but geez." 

Jim shrugged. "If the shoe fits," he muttered. 

"Hey, he's a nice old guy." Blair made his whisper as chiding as a whisper could be. "A little vague, maybe, but nice." 

"A _little_ vague." Jim rolled his eyes. 

Blair jabbed his elbow into Jim's ribs warningly as Lord Emsworth… pottered… up to the pigsty. "Hi," Blair said cheerfully, "How's it going?" 

"Going? Going where, what?" Lord Emsworth answered, looking mildly puzzled. "What is it that's going where?" 

Blair opened his mouth, ready to clear things up, but Lord Emsworth's next words seemed to show that the subject was closed. Or, possibly, forgotten. "Ah," Lord E. said, "yes. I see you've been touring the grounds." He eyed Blair and Jim benevolently but uncertainly, as if he wasn't entirely sure he'd ever met them before. "Mr.… Mr…. Ah. Quite," he said to Blair. He turned towards Jim. "And Mr.… Um. Yes." 

"It's Blair," Blair supplied. "And Jim." 

Lord Emsworth stared at him without any visible sign of recognition. Then his expression brightened. "Yes, yes. I remember. From America, aren't you? My younger son lives in America. He sells dog-biscuits. I wouldn't suppose you to have met him; America is quite large." His expression brightened even more as he turned towards the pigsty and gestured at its inhabitant. "Have you met the Empress yet? Impressive, isn't she?" 

The Earl's eyes were now roaming lovingly (there wasn't any other word for it) over the expansive contours of his sausage on the hoof. "The Empress has won First Prize in the Fat Pigs Class at the Shropshire Agricultural Show for the past two years running," he informed them, with every appearance of personal satisfaction. 

The pig — a pig who was apparently _not_ immediately slated to be the star ingredient in a couple of upcoming truckloads of Jimmie Dean's best breakfast patties — grunted, and Lord Emsworth beamed. 

"First prize? That's great," Blair said, jabbing Jim with his elbow again when Jim echoed, "Yeah, great," with all the enthusiasm of a block of concrete. "You must be very proud," Blair added, digging his elbow in a little further to prevent Jim from saying anything else. 

"Yes, yes, yes, what?" Lord Emsworth answered, beaming even more broadly. "Indeed. She's a fine pig, isn't she? Do you keep pigs, Mr…. Mr.... Ah?" 

"Uh." Blair said. He would've said more, probably, but he was too busy jabbing Jim with his elbow. Again. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Tuesday night.**

"Do you keep pigs, Mr. Ah?" Jim whispered into Blair's ear as Blair slid into bed beside him. 

Blair rolled his eyes. "As sexy come-ons go, Jim, I don't think that one's a keeper." The moonlight pouring in through the windows was painting Jim and the sheets in silver, with stripes of black shadow. Jim looked good in silver and black. 

Or maybe it was just the way the moonlight seemed to be in cahoots with Jim's muscles, making him look even more like... well, like exactly what Blair wanted. Tonight and every night. 

"Oh, I don't know. In the right circles…" Jim leered at him, or at least it looked like a leer in the silvery half-light. 

Blair snorted. "I don't think a circle like that could ever be called _right,_ Jim." 

"Your mother seems to have an entirely different opinion about your opinion, Chief. I thought we'd established that she thinks you're far too enthusiastic about spending time with pigs. In a manner of speaking." 

Blair abandoned the sortie his hand had started towards Lower Ellison Upon Beauty Rest and sat up abruptly, indignant. "Naomi? You're talking about Naomi _now? And_ pigs?" Jim's hand pursued Blair's, disgruntledly, trying to return it to its mission, and Blair brushed it away. "Pigs. And Naomi. That's really pushing the envelope, buster, especially after I go to all the trouble to sneak down forty miles of hallway to climb into your bed." He batted Jim's hand away again. 

Or he _tried_ to bat it away. But the Rangers (or somebody) had a lot to answer for, like the underhanded move Jim employed to get Blair onto his back, pinned underneath Jim's unyieldingly solid weight with no apparent effort and with Jim growling into his ear, "Trouble? I'll show you trouble, Sandburg." 

And he did. 

Brilliantly. _Toppingly._

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Wednesday morning.**

"'Rumple the sheets in my bed so it looks slept in' — come on, you think I wouldn't remember that?" Blair glared mildly at Jim as he pulled on his decrepit and undoubtedly inappropriate for wearing in a castle sweatpants and wrapped himself up in Jim's robe. At least _that_ looked okay for the circumstances: naturally it did; it was Jim's best robe. The next time they stayed at a castle, he was going to borrow Jim's credit card first and do some wardrobe upgrading. Field expeditions in the South Pacific were a lot less expensive, appropriate-wardrobe-wise. 

Jim shrugged. "I don't care whether you remember it or not. She's _your_ mother." 

Blair increased his glare slightly. "And you so do not want to be meditated over and have your aura cleansed; trust me. Naomi's never going to be thrilled about me being involved with someone who's involved in law enforcement, no matter when we tell her. But she'll be a lot more open to acceptance after she detaches a little more from the not getting arrested in D.C. thing." 

Jim pushed the sheets aside and sat up on the edge of the bed. "Your mother is not cleansing my 'aura,' Sandburg," he grumbled. "Hell, I wouldn't even let _you_ cleanse my aura. Whatever's involved in that — and don't tell me; I don't want to know." 

"You really don't," Blair agreed, watching as Jim stood and stretched in the pale gold early morning light. 

Pale gold was another good color for Jim, maybe even better than moonlight silver. 

"Hey," Blair said, his hands going back to the knot he'd just tied in the belt of the robe and beginning to undo it, "when do the maintenance-infrastructure people for this place hit the morning housekeeping trail, anyway? We've got another half an hour or so, right? And these sheets are already toast; we can hardly make them look worse." 

"Hmm," Jim answered, stretching a lazy hand to the still partially tied belt of the robe and giving it a yank, pulling Blair towards him. "The sheets might as well get their money's worth. You have a good point, Mr. Ah." 

"Well, _I_ always thought my point was pretty good. At least, I've never had any complaints from — ah…" Blair said, "like _that,_ yeah," against the base of Jim's throat, as one of Jim's hands wandered inside Blair's disreputable sweatpants. "Ahhh..." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still Wednesday morning.**

"I believe," Lady Constance said, "that you haven't met my brother's personal secretary, Rupert Baxter." She looked away from Blair and Jim to bestow what almost seemed like a fond glance (certainly way fonder than any glance she'd yet bestowed on Blair) on the new guy taking up space in the breakfast room. "Mr. Baxter was performing an errand for me in the city and returned earlier this morning." 

Mr. Baxter, a.k.a. Rupert the Personal Secretary, had clearly returned with a killer appetite, since the plate he'd temporarily abandoned at the table when he stood politely at Lady Constance's introduction was stacked high with eggs and sausages and toast. 

"Hey, how you doing?" Blair said, sticking his hand out towards the guy. 

"Mr. Sandburg," Rupert answered stiffly, shaking Blair's hand with what appeared to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm. 

"Just Blair," Blair said with a smile that didn't seem to loosen Rupert up any, since he proceeded to stare at Blair with obvious disapproval for a long and utterly silent moment before he inclined his head to acknowledge Jim, who was currently eyeing the platter of kippers on the sideboard with some obvious disapproval of his own. 

"Mr. Ellison," Rupert said, politely if still stiffly. 

"Hmm?" Jim muttered, pulling his eyes away from the offending fish. "Oh. Nice to meet you." 

That went over somewhat better than Blair's more informal attempts, and Blair grimaced defensively. If at first you don't succeed…. "So Lord Emsworth has a personal secretary, huh?" he said, going for breezy and casual. "That's cool. I guess there's a lot of administrative paperwork that goes along with being an earl. And raising pigs." 

"Quite," said Rupert Baxter icily, looking at Blair much the same way Jim had looked at the kippered fish. 

Which, okay, rankled a bit. "Right," Blair said. "Quite." Under his breath he added, "Bite me." 

The corner of Jim's mouth twitched, and Blair gave Rupert the Iceman his sunniest smile. After all, he had Jim in his corner, while Rupert, at least to Blair's admittedly sketchy knowledge, only had a really big pig and a pottering, if actually very nice, earl, and (apparently) Lady Constance Keeble; Blair shouldn't blame him — too much — for being kind of a jerk. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Thursday morning.**

"Jim," Blair whispered urgently, smacking Jim on the arm as unobtrusively as he could, trying to avoid attracting any (further) attention from Rupert Baxter, who was standing at the far side of the foyer and staring suspiciously at Jim. 

Of course he was. This was the eighth time Jim had zoned in the three days since they'd arrived, and either Lady Constance and her lorgnette or Rupert Baxter and his suspicious and preternaturally disapproving eyebrows had been in the vicinity almost every single time. If Jim kept this up, either the lorgnette or the eyebrows would decide to call in the guys in white jackets. 

Jim blinked and shook his head violently, like he was shaking off a horsefly. So much for being unobtrusive. "What was it this time?" Blair asked, under his breath. So far, they'd had: 

1) The candlelight reflecting off the chandelier in the dining room. Blair'd had to knock his wineglass over as a diversion, and whoa, did Lady Constance and her lorgnette have a lock on disdainful 'I expected nothing better of you' glares. 

2) The stripy patterns mowed into the (impossibly) smooth and vividly green lawn. Those _were_ pretty hypnotic, Blair had to admit. Also just kind of pretty. 

3) The stripy patterns mowed into the (impossibly) smooth and vividly green lawn as reflected in Rupert Baxter's glasses when they were all having tea on the terrace. (That Rupert had ended up spilling his tea on his shoes hadn't been Blair's fault, no matter what Rupert thought. Well, okay, it _had_ been Blair's fault, but not intentionally. He'd only jostled Rupert's elbow to get Rupert to move his head a little and thereby change the reflection in his glasses so Jim would snap out of his zone. That Blair jostling Rupert's elbow had also caused Rupert to dump his afternoon caffeine fix all over his classy leather lace-ups was a total accident.) 

4) The (truly astonishing) mustache belonging to one of the gardeners. Actually, Blair had sort of zoned on that one, too, right along with Jim. 

5) The tassels Jim's Green Room sported so lavishly. That one was Blair's fault, mostly — but come on, tassels? He hadn't been doing anything… ah, _indiscreet,_ with the tassels, not really, but apparently even trailing a couple of the things teasingly across Jim's palm — when combined with various other, possibly less discreet efforts on Blair's part — was enough to put Mr. Extra Sensitive Touchy Feely down for the count. At least neither Lady C. nor the Grim Rupert had been present for that one. 

6) Beach. Blair was pretty sure this was the first time a sentinel had ever zoned on the sheer butleriness of a butler (Burton certainly hadn't ever documented a butler-based zone). Blair couldn't blame Jim for that zone, though. Beach was… Beach. 

7) The dining room chandelier. Again. Lady Constance now flinched every time Blair even looked at his wineglass. 

The recurring morning kippers had come close to being Zone Number 8 several times, but disgust apparently kept saving Jim at the last moment. 

And now they were up to _actual_ Zone Number 8. Shit. 

"Shit," Jim muttered. He looked embarrassed and annoyed. "One of those sing-song police sirens they use over here," he said. "Didn't you hear it?" 

"No, I didn't hear it. Not that it would help any if I had; I don't think Rupert over there would consider a cop-car siren to be a viable explanation for you freezing mid-step in the middle of the foyer with a nobody's-home expression on your face." Blair aimed a breezy, obfuscatory smile in Baxter's direction. The smile bounced ineffectively off Baxter's glasses, not to mention his eyebrows, and Blair's stomach sank. 

What was Rupert doing wandering around in the middle of the morning, anyway? Shouldn't he be filing papers or taking dictation or helping Lord Emsworth polish his pig or something? There was, like, _zero_ doubt that he would snitch to Lady Constance about this, and God knew what Lady C. would end up saying to Nigel-in-Wales if Rupert got her worked up enough. Even if Naomi didn't find out that her son was porking a pig — okay, he was in a little deeper than just _porking_ — she wouldn't be a whole lot less annoying to deal with if she thought that her son was platonically entrusting his wellbeing, job-wise and roommate-wise, to a pig with faulty wiring, so to speak. 

"So where were you?" Jim accused. 

Blair sighed. He was supposed to be watching Jim's back, that was true enough, especially since Blandings Castle had unexpectedly turned out to be the zone-out headquarters of the northern hemisphere, but sometimes nature called, and Jim needed to be able to handle the reins himself for a few minutes whenever that happened. "Not my fault," he said, sotto voce. "I had to, um… You know. Go to the loo." 'Pee' didn't seem like it would sound right, even in a whisper, in the somewhat less than casual environs of the castle's entrance hall. 

"The 'loo.' Christ," Jim said, rolling his eyes. "You're going to keep saying that even when we get back home, aren't you." 

"Yep," Blair said, rocking back on his heels. 

"Christ," Jim said again. 

Across the foyer, Rupert Baxter appeared to scowl even more disapprovingly, as if he'd heard the whole exchange despite the acres of marble floor between his over-interested ears and Blair's and Jim's grouping of two near the front door. Blair gave him a (hopefully disarming) smile and a little wave, which Rupert awarded with one of his patented Glares of Death before he turned and stalked off down the hallway. 

"That guy really doesn't like me," Blair said, like Jim didn't already know that. "Also, you have _got_ to stop zoning in front of him." Like Jim didn't already know _that,_ too. 

"Here's an idea. We go back home now, and I promise to stop zoning out in front of Baxter." 

Blair sighed and thumped Jim on the arm. "We're _not_ leaving early, Jim. Give it up." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Thursday night.**

"Why is it that I'm the one who has to sneak over to your room all the time?" Blair complained as he shut the door behind himself and started to untie the belt of his (well, Jim's) robe. 

Jim was already in bed, sitting up and leaning back magisterially against the headboard. He was framed by the green velvet bed hangings and their deceptively dangerous tassels, and he looked, Blair had to admit, extremely good. That dark green was yet another excellent color for him. 

"Stop stealing my robe and we'll discuss it," Jim said, patting the bed beside him. 

Like he meant that. Right. 

Blair knew Jim meant the come-to-bed thing, of course, but he doubted Jim actually meant the implied room-and-role-reversal thing. "You know what I think, man?" Blair asked as he climbed into bed, ignoring the destination Jim had indicated on the mattress and straddling Jim's lap instead, ducking his head to nuzzle Jim's lightly stubbled jaw. "I think you get off on me coming over here to you like some kind of loyal subject or something and being given an audience with your royal highness." 

"Sure, I do," Jim said, in a tone of voice that clearly meant _you're an idiot._ He threaded his hands through Blair's hair and cupped the back of his head. "You're the one who's related to the aristocracy here, Mr. Ah." 

"Hmm," Blair murmured, with a judicious wiggle against Jim's crotch as he let his lips begin to travel along Jim's jaw towards his ear. "That would mean my wish is your command then, wouldn't it?" 

"Let's not get carried away," Jim said, murmuring himself. "Not..." Blair wiggled again as his mouth reached Jim's earlobe, "entirely carried away. Not... nnnh..." 

"Okay," Blair said, blowing the word gently into Jim's ear and following it with his tongue, delicately. 

" _God,_ Chief," said Jim, the words strangled around a gulp of air. "You want me to wake up the whole fucking castle, you keep doing that." 

Blair pulled back and rested his forehead against the side of Jim's head, and smiled, waiting for… 

"Hey," Jim grumbled, "I said keep doing that." 

Waiting for that. Yeah. He smiled again into Jim's hair, and whispered, "Your wish, my command," and dived back into Jim's ear with his tongue. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Early Friday afternoon.**

The sun was warm, and Blair stifled a post-lunch yawn as he wandered towards a particularly bushy section of one of the castle's seemingly endless garden areas. An inviting bench was parked in an even more inviting patch of shade in the near distance, and he headed in that direction. Might as well take a load off. 

The first thirty seconds of taking a load off felt nicely relaxing. Of course, those seconds would have been more relaxing — or more stimulating, depending on how you looked at it — if Jim were sitting there in the shade beside him instead of hanging out in the drawing room with Penelope and Lady Constance. 

Or, which was way more likely, hanging out with Penelope _sans_ Lady Constance. The odds that Lady C. hadn't hauled ass thirty seconds after she maneuvered Blair into taking a solo stroll in the gardens and Jim into accompanying her and Penelope into the drawing room after lunch were microscopic. Blair had to admire her, really; her dedication to her cause was almost Naomi-esque. That her cause was getting her niece married to Jim and his supposed inheritance-and-connections-to-be was beginning to get a bit old, however. This bench was peaceful, private, and made for two, and — 

"I say, I was wondering if —" 

"Gah!" 

Okay, so maybe the bench had been made for two, but the two Blair had had in mind were him and Jim, not him and… and… _that._ He sucked in a couple of deep breaths and tried to regain some composure. And some manners; after all, a "Gah" and a flinch — or, possibly, a nine-inch vertical sitting jump — were a little rude. But even when approached gradually and voluntarily from a distance, that mustache would be startling. To have it appear suddenly from within the depths of your next-door-neighbor rhododendron and without pausing sit down on the bench beside you was actively alarming. 

It was the same mustache that Jim had zoned on earlier in the week, the mustache belonging to one of the gardeners. It had to be the same mustache; there couldn't be two mustaches like that in the vicinity of the castle. Or in England as a whole, surely. Or on the planet as a whole. Surely. 

After another couple of deep breaths, Blair managed to wheeze out, "Sorry. You, uh, startled me," and the Mustache's shoulders slumped. 

"Right," the Mustache said. "You'd think that would be enough, wouldn't you? I mean, I walked down to the village yesterday on my half day and on the way got chased by three dogs — three and a quarter, if you count the Chihuahua — and nearly got run over by two motorcars and a bicycle swerving out of control when they caught sight of me. I also caused a cat to jump into a brook and swim for its ruddy life and left a rabbit in apparent hysterics in the hedgerow." Mustache's voice turned petulant. "If a girl had even half a heart, she'd think that enough, wouldn't she?" 

"I —" 

"Of course, she doesn't know I'm here, there's that. That's where you come in." 

"Where I —" 

"The thing is, she's always with that other fellow, the fellow you came with, that tall, good-looking, good-for-nothing bounder." 

"Good-for—" 

"Well, what else would you call somebody who's making a move on your girl?" 

"Making a…. whoa, time out; Jim's not —" 

"The thing is, he's a rozzer, right? Faces down muggers and saves kittens and all that? So she won't be calling _him_ a sniveling worm just because he's sensibly cautious about arousing the wrath of her aunt, a woman who's widely known to breakfast on wasps and barbed wire, will she?" 

"Kittens? That isn't —" 

Mustache huffed. "But a fellow risks life and limb, protected by no more than a paste-on ginger mustache — which is quite likely made out of poison oak instead of horsehair, the way the bloody thing itches — a fellow hangs about with shovels and rakes and other rustic implements of manual labor and pretends to be a gardener, all the while fully aware that a dragon in female human form might penetrate his disguise at any moment — a fellow does all that in order to just be near a girl; that should count for something, shouldn't it?" 

"Paste-on… wait, you're only _pretending_ to —" 

"It's all useless, though, unless she knows I'm here. That's where you come in." 

And now they were pretty much back where all of this had started."Where I come in?" Blair asked, and at least this time he got an entire sentence out without being interrupted. 

"I've written her a note explaining it all." 

"Explaining. Uh, okay." Blair eyed Mustache a little warily. "So you're not really one of Lord Emsworth's gardeners, you're only pretending to be one. And your —" he had to pause to clear his throat, "— your, uh, mustache there isn't really your mustache. And your, um, 'girl' is Penelope?" 

"That's what I said, old chap," Mustache said impatiently. "Haven't you been listening?" 

"Right," Blair said. "Uh, I'm Blair. Blair Sandburg." He held out his hand. Mustache instantly thrust an envelope into it, and Blair winced. Accepting Mustache's note hadn't been his intention. Not yet, anyway; not without more information. He'd just wanted to be polite. 

Mustache, however, seemed to relax now that Blair was in possession of the envelope. "Milton Greaves," he said, apparently by way of introducing himself. "We were going to be married, you know, until this whole business about my uncle cutting me off without a penny came up, and Lady C. somehow found out we were engaged and put her foot down; no niece of hers was going to marry a penniless journalist and all that. Not a disinherited one, at any rate." 

The mustache trembled like Milton was grimacing somewhere beneath its extensive shrubbery. "Naturally, I suggested we elope. I've got a cousin holding a decent job for me with a daily rag in Melbourne, so that's all right, but Penny was a bit ticked off. She wanted me to defy her aunt before she would elope with me. Something about if I loved her enough, I'd be willing to stand up to anyone. I would, too. Anyone but Lady C. " Milton shuddered. "You've met Lady C., of course. And her lorgnette." 

"Oh, yeah," Blair said. He and Milton sat in silence for a moment. He got where Milton was coming from, even if he personally would have chosen defiance rather than wear a mustache like that. 

Probably. 

Maybe. That lorgnette… 

Right. Enough of that. He waggled the note at Milton. "So, this?" 

"It explains everything." 

It sounded like Penelope wanted action, not explanation, but Blair didn't want to rain on the poor guy's parade. "You want me to pass it along to her? I can do that." 

"Decent of you, old soul," Milton said. "Don't let anyone else know, though. Especially that bounder." 

Blair rolled his eyes. "That 'bounder' is Jim, and he's my friend, and trust me, he's _not_ trying to get in with Penelope. And I don't want to keep secrets from him; that never works out well." 

The mustache quivered violently, and Milton's voice sounded strangled when he spoke. "I say, don't! I've seen him eyeing me suspiciously, and we daren't risk it. He's a rozzer; what if he decides to turn me in for impersonating a gardener? It would be just my luck." 

"Jim wouldn't do that. Anyway, I don't even know if you're breaking any laws here, not to mention that we're way out of Jim's jurisdiction." 

The mustache quivered even more violently. "It's too much of a risk. Merely passing a note along privately, surely you can do that? For the sake of, well, love? Two hearts sundered, and all that?" 

Wonderful. Blair sighed. Yes, it was kind of romantic. It was also kind of dorky. Still, maybe Milton's note would detach Penelope from Jim, and the next time Blair parked himself on one of the castle's benches, his company would be a tall, good-looking, good-for-nothing — and completely mustache-free — bounder. Blair could absolutely get behind that. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still early Friday afternoon.**

"From _whom?"_ Penelope said. She glared with icy disdain at the envelope Blair was trying to hand her, and Blair winced. Okay, so he'd made a mistake. He should have just given her the note and not told her who it was from. Now she was eyeing the envelope like it was a despicable spineless worm or something, and Blair took an involuntary step back. 

"Um, you could read it?" he offered. "I mean, Milton said it explains —" 

"'Explains?'" Penelope's voice was as freezing as her glare. "Nothing that the person to whom you are referring could conceivably offer as an 'explanation' could be anything in which I would have the slightest interest. If that person cared for me at all he would do the simple, trifling thing I've asked of him. If he continues to refuse to do this simple, trifling thing, our engagement will continue to be at an end, and no mere 'explanation' could possibly change my mind." 

"That's totally understandable," Blair said, in his most soothing voice; there was more of a resemblance between Penelope and Lady Constance than he'd realized. "But you can't really call facing down Lady Constance _trifling._ Lady Constance's got, uh, a kind of… forceful personality; you have to admit that. She would intimidate a lot of people, not just Milton." 

"She doesn't intimidate Jim," Penelope said. Her voice was suddenly warm and maybe even dreamy, and hey, no. The only person who got to be warm and dreamy about Jim was Blair. 

"Jim's not intimidated by anything," Penelope added, even more warmly and dreamily. 

"Right," Blair said, backing towards the library door, "sure. Not Jim. No, Jim isn't… He's not… Right. Excuse me, I've got to, uh…" The handle of the door turned underneath Blair's hand and he slipped out into the hall as he added, "…go somewhere." 

Unfortunately, the hallway Blair backed out into turned out to be unexpectedly solid. And elbowed. And, subsequently, lumpy underfoot. 

"Ooof," said Rupert Baxter, from floor level. 

_Crap._ Blair hastily removed his foot from the Baxterian midsection. "Oops. Sorry, man," he said with an apologetic grimace. "You okay?" 

"Quite," said Rupert Baxter coldly, sitting up and rubbing his stomach. And scowling. Suspiciously. 

Like that was new. 

Blair sighed and offered the Scowling and Suspicious Baxter a hand up. That Rupert wasn't all that happy accepting Blair's help at the moment wasn't Blair's fault… Well, maybe it was. But Rupert releasing Blair's hand like it was on fire as soon as he was upright? Then backing away so fast that he bumped into one of the small tables that were strewn along the sides of the hallway and — clearly — bruised his hip on the corner of the table? _That_ wasn't Blair's fault. 

Okay, maybe it was. Kind of. 

But only technically. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still Friday afternoon, but later.**

Blair ran his hands through his hair. Again. "Jim," he said, again, "we need to talk." 

Not that he was actually saying it to _Jim,_ apparently, since wherever Jim was he obviously wasn't listening. This was the sixth far-flung corner of the castle and its environs Blair had made that announcement in so far, and he was beginning to feel a little… ignored. 

But the thing was, Jim subconsciously tended to listen for a) his name and b) Blair's voice, even at a distance. Which was useful most of the time, even if it sometimes sucked — like the time Jim had been in the bullpen and overheard Blair's not-meant-to-be-overheard comments, made solely to himself in the privacy of the elevator, regarding Jim's reluctance to participate in a series of vital tests Blair had developed for him… Well, anyway, Jim (or at least Jim's subconscious) should've heard him by now. 

Of course, it wasn't like Jim couldn't fend for himself as far as the Penelopes of the world were concerned, but he could also be oblivious, and he probably didn't realize he needed to stop being so… so _Jim_ to Penelope. It was way past time for him to start letting Penelope down gently; before she forgot all about Milton, for one thing. And before she _really_ fell for Jim, for another. 

"Jim," Blair said yet again. "I'm at the pigsty, hanging out with the Empress, and I've got nothing against pigs but I really need to talk to you, not her. I'll wait here ten minutes, okay? _Please_ show up." 

Ten minutes spent watching a dedicatedly non-conversational pig tuck into her pig chow, a pig too busy stuffing her chops to contribute even an occasional grunt to the situation, didn't do a whole lot for Blair's mood. 

Neither, when the ten minutes was over and he'd made his way across the lawn and back into the castle, did his encounter with Beach. "Mr. Ellison went into Market Blandings some time ago, sir," Beach said, "accompanying Miss Penelope. If I'm not mistaken, Miss Penelope had expressed an interest in showing Mr. Ellison something that she referred to as the local sights." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Friday evening.**

"So, sightseeing, huh?" It was a perfectly innocuous question, and despite the fact that — courtesy of Blandings' traditional after-dinner, guys-only, booze-and-cigar gathering — he and Jim weren't alone, Blair didn't bother to keep his voice down. 

Or, apparently, entirely free from peevishness, since the new guy who'd shown up at dinner had evidently noticed the edge to Blair's voice; Blair could almost see his ears perk up. 

Jim's ears didn't perk up. Jim was too busy contemplating his snifter of brandy to do more than murmur, "Hmm?" before crinkling his eyes almost completely shut in appreciation at his first sip of the stuff. 

Sure, the odds were excellent that it was the Rolls Royce of brandies. Blair hadn't tried it yet, but Blandings Castle didn't seem to stint on the quality of its alcoholic offerings, so Jim probably should be excused for letting himself savor it for a moment. Still, it was getting a little old to keep coming in second, first to Penelope and Market Blandings and 'sightseeing,' and now to a snifter of brandy. 

"Sightseeing," Blair repeated, making an effort to sound less peevish. "With Penelope? Must've been pretty fascinating." 

"Hmm?" Jim murmured again, after another hit on the brandy. Then he finally got with the program and looked at Blair. His eyebrows drew down a couple of degrees. "It was okay." 

Okay? Blair looked at Jim with a certain amount of disbelief. "'Okay?' You and Penelope barely made it back before Beach's crew started serving the soup. If your sightseeing trip was just 'okay,' why were you —" 

"We lost track of time. What difference does it make?" 

Blair could feel the frown on his face and didn't bother to tone it down any. "I needed to talk to you." 

Jim's left eyebrow rose. "So talk." 

The new guy's ears perked up even further. So did Rupert Baxter's. Or Blair assumed they did; it was hard to tell with Rupert, since he always looked like he was gathering evidence so he could turn you in to the KGB or the Spanish Inquisition. Or, possibly, in Blair's case, the Greater Bickleigh-on-Wold Society for the Banishment of Bowling Shirts, if a society like that actually existed. Blair sighed. He should've waited until he and Jim were alone; he totally knew that, had known it before he said anything in the first place. "Later," he told Jim. "It isn't a big deal, anyway." 

Surely it wasn't a big deal, right? Jim wasn't interested in Penelope, and Penelope… yeah, she was interested in Jim, but she'd already been thwarted in love at least once; presumably she could handle being thwarted by Jim, too. Especially if Jim would pay attention to what was going on and get to work on the 'letting her down gently' thing. 

Jim seemed to take Blair's reply as permission to go back to nearly zoning over his brandy. The new guy, after eyeing both Jim and Blair in a congenial but still sort of penetrating way, seemed to take Blair's reply as a reason to stroll over to the chair Lord Emsworth had ensconced himself in and start up a conversation, although Lord E. didn't seem particularly aware of that fact, and Rupert… 

Rupert seemed to take Blair's reply as a reminder to massage his mid-section tenderly — right where Blair had, unfortunately, more or less stepped on it, earlier in the day — and wince, while shooting Blair a particularly speaking glare. 

"Sorry," Blair offered, for about the tenth time, with an appeasing grimace. Like the apology did any good; Rupert's glare powered up a notch, if anything, and New Guy paused in his one-sided chat with the Earl to cast another congenial but penetrating glance at Blair. 

"Good brandy," Jim said, pouring himself another snifter full. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Friday night.**

"Jim, we need to —" Blair said, as he closed Jim's bedroom door behind him. "Jim? Jim." Then he sighed, deeply. "You've got to be kidding me." 

He crossed the expanse of pricey rug and stood for a moment beside the bed, looking down at Jim. At dead to the world Jim, who was snoring gently as he lay, still fully dressed, on top of the covers. 

Blair sighed again and reached down to smack Jim's arm lightly. "Hey, Sleeping Beauty. Wake up." 

Jim didn't wake up, unless you were willing to count mumbling something unintelligible that sounded like it contained way more vowels than it did consonants as waking up. 

"So, what, the honeymoon's over? You can't even be bothered to wait up for me? That's really great, Jim." 

Jim still didn't wake up. Of course he didn't: Blair Sandburg, second fiddle to a) a gorgeous, curves-in-all-the-right-places, currently Jim-worshipping English redhead, b) a decanter of (admittedly exceptional) brandy, and now c) Mr. Sandman. 

Blair nudged Jim's arm again, and Jim muttered something undecipherable but clearly derogatory and turned over onto his side in an uncoordinated sprawl, mashing his face down onto the pillow with the air of a man who'd spent a chunk of the evening loving more than one snifter of brandy not entirely wisely but too well. 

"Right," Blair said to himself, shedding Jim's robe and getting into bed. That the most direct bed-entry route involved climbing across Jim was immaterial; he wasn't exactly going to get any kind of rise out of Jim, given the circumstances. When Blair reached his side of the bed, he shoved a wayward Ellison leg out of his way and crawled under the covers without even considering trying to tug Jim out of at least some of his clothes so he could sleep more comfortably. At any rate, Jim seemed to be sleeping plenty comfortably as it was. 

Blair, however, wasn't sleeping comfortably. He wasn't sleeping at all, as it turned out; not after it occurred to him that maybe Jim's brandy buzz was due less to a somewhat injudicious appreciation of fine alcohol and more to wanting an excuse to avoid talking with Blair about his afternoon with Penelope. 

Or due, say, maybe, to wanting to drown a guilty conscience. 

Which was ridiculous, and Blair wasn't that insecure, and Penelope couldn't possibly be a match for him when it came to wielding a can of Reddi-wip, anyway, and besides, Jim wouldn't — 

Of course he wouldn't. Jim was with him. Jim wasn't on the market. Not in Market Blandings or anywhere else. Jim was with _him._

Somehow, though, telling himself that didn't do all that much towards letting Blair fall asleep. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Early Saturday morning.**

A muffled groan penetrated Blair's foggy early-morning thoughts, which were pretty much the same as his middle-of-the-night thoughts, depressingly, and he picked up Jim's limp wrist to check his watch. 

Terrific. It was time to head off down the hallway if discretion was to be preserved. Blair let Jim's arm drop back down onto the bed and was rewarded by another groan and a mumble that wasn't any more distinct than last night's offerings. So much for having that little chat with Jim first thing this morning. 

Blair extracted himself from underneath the covers and the well-muscled arm that, shortly before dawn, had planted itself on top of the blankets covering his chest, and stood beside the bed for a moment, staring down at the owner of said well-muscled arm. The Blandings Castle dress code for dinner was yet another really good look on Jim, even when everything Jim was wearing was creased or crushed or crumpled. 

Penelope was kind of a good look on Jim, too, even if Blair hated to admit it. She had been last night, at any rate, hanging off Jim's arm with stars in her eyes while Jim fed her "Aw, Shucks, I Was Just Doing My Job" stories about life as a Cascade, Washington, U.S.A. crime fighter. 

Okay, they'd been true stories, and Jim had seriously downplayed his role as the hero of the situation in every single story, and he'd also gotten very well acquainted with the brandy by then… 

But brandy or no brandy, Jim didn't _do_ that. He didn't brag about himself that way, even obliquely; he didn't ever seem to understand that there could be anything about himself that was worth bragging about in the first place. He considered himself to be competent and professional, good at what he did, but that was as far as it went. Which wasn't nearly far enough as far as Blair was concerned; Jim had 'hero' written all over him, inside and out, as far as Blair was concerned. Still, that was part of Jim's charm: Jim thought of himself as an ordinary guy (if you left out the part about his senses, which Jim would certainly _like_ to leave out) who just did whatever he had to do to do his job. 

Except that last night, with Penelope, he _had_ done that; had, at least sort of, bragged about himself. In story after story after story. 

Jim mumbled something — something that sounded suspiciously like "Penny" — and Blair ditched his half-formed plan of going in search of a glass of water and some aspirin to leave on the nightstand beside the bed. 

He paused briefly before he retrieved Jim's robe from the chair he'd draped it over last night. He wasn't exactly sure why he was hesitating; his sleeping attire was still as disreputable for wandering castle hallways uncloaked as it had been since they got here, for one thing. For another thing, it was _Jim's_ robe, and wrapping it around himself was almost like having Jim's arms wrapped around him by proxy (a sentiment Blair was never, ever going to share with Jim; he could just see the eye-roll that would produce), and… 

And Jim hadn't tried to talk him into leaving early even once yesterday. 

Blair left the robe on the chair. Anybody up early enough to catch a glimpse of him in a hallway (hopefully far from Jim's room) would just have to deal. An eyeful of ratty sweatpants and badly faded, falling-apart T-shirt probably wouldn't actually physically hurt anyone. 

Except maybe Rupert Baxter. Which would be okay with Blair. Technically speaking, anyway. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Saturday morning. Later, but still early.**

Blair contemplated the sideboard with its full load of hearty breakfast offerings and found himself smiling with anticipation, petty and bad for his karma though the anticipation undoubtedly was. Bacon, ham, eggs, kippers… Jim didn't do well with bacon, ham, or eggs when he was hung over, and he didn't do well with kippers ever, whether he was hung over or not. Maybe Penelope would show up in time to witness Jim's no-doubt bleary arrival and his reaction to the bacon, ham, eggs, and kippers, and thereby learn that there were in fact things that intimidated the otherwise apparently perfect Mr. Ellison. 

And if Jim had the wisdom to completely avoid the sideboard, Blair could always load up a plate with a carefully selected offering, heavy on the greasy protein, and hand it to him. After all, it was supposed to be good for people to face their fears. 

Blair was pondering the relationship ethics of the situation — three slices of bacon or four? — when Jim showed up. So it wouldn't be exactly nice to confront a hung-over Jim with four slices of bacon; on the other hand… 

On the other hand, the relationship ethics of the situation were entirely moot. The Jim who'd just showed up was a cheerful, bright, breezy Jim who made straight for the sideboard and started piling up the bacon and eggs on a plate like he hadn't eaten for weeks. 

Okay, even if Jim had found some aspirin, this was baffling. Blair joined him in front of the sideboard, wondering if there were little cartoon question-marks floating around outside his head to match the question-marks floating around inside it. 

"Morning, Chief," Jim said — breezily — and added a couple of kippers to his plate with a sort of what-the-hell, insouciant benevolence. 

Blair blinked. "Jim? What…? _How…_?" 

Jim chuckled. _Chuckled._ With a hangover. And with self-imposed kippers on his plate. "I ran into Beach," he said. "Good guy, Beach. He offered me... what did he call it? A 'pick-me-up,' yeah. Something he'd learned the secret of from some guy who'd visited here, a Mr. Rooster's man, I think he said. Guess he meant valet or something? I'm not sure." 

"'Rooster?'" Blair asked. Kind of faintly, probably, and it wasn't really an important point, but still… 

"Or Booster. Or something like that," Jim said. "Doesn't matter. That 'pick-me-up' is pretty amazing, though, Chief. I feel like a new man." 

"Great. That's great," Blair said, still kind of faintly. He looked at the kippers on Jim's plate, then up at Jim's face, which was practically glowing with _joi d' vivre._ "Great," he repeated. 

"Good morning," Penelope said, from half a step beyond Jim's shoulder, and Blair flinched. 

"You're looking a little peaked there, Sandburg," Jim said. "Maybe you should go hunt down Beach." Then he turned to Penelope and smiled, the smile that came with a bonus crinkle at the corner of his eyes. "Morning, Penny. Sleep well?" 

Penelope said… something. Blair was too busy noticing the disturbingly dreamy look she was directing at Jim to pay much attention to what she was saying, at least until she said, "You _will_ be a darling and help me with that this morning then, Jim?" 

Blair moved until he was behind Penelope and directed a tiny, sentinel-vision-sized headshake at Jim while saying underneath his breath, "No, Jim, don't; we need to —" 

"Not a problem," Jim said, smiling at Penelope. "Happy to help, like I said yesterday." The crinkle at the corner of his eyes deepened. "You want me, you got me." 

Then he handed Penelope an empty plate and stuck to her elbow while she egged and baconed and kippered the plate, and stayed firmly stuck to her elbow as she headed to the table. 

"Are you quite all right, Mr. Sandburg?" The new guy from last night, Sir… crap, Sir somebody, wasn't it? — Blair should've been paying more attention at dinner — asked, strolling up, and Blair offered him a half-hearted smile. 

"Great," he said, "I'm just great. Excuse me, I need to go find Beach." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Saturday morning, a little (a very little) later.**

"Wooster," Blair said to himself and hiccupped. 

"Bless you," a voice said from behind Blair, and it was only due to the power of Beach's (or, really, Jeeves') pick-me-up that Blair didn't jump. The library had been empty when he'd wandered in here, after all; was it too much to ask that it stay empty for fifteen minutes or so, so Blair could think in peace? 

"Though that's the correct response to a sneeze rather than a hiccup, of course," the voice continued affably. Whoever it was sounded vaguely familiar, which made sense when Blair turned and found the new guy at his elbow. Sir… Gossip, was it? No, that couldn't be right. Nobody could be named Sir Gossip. Surely. Even as hyper-focused as Blair had been on Jim all last evening, he couldn't have failed to notice if the new guy was named Sir — 

Glossop. That was it, not Gossip. And… Reginald? Rodham? Broderick? Wait, Roderick. It was Roderick: Sir Roderick Glossop, new guy; signed on for the weekend, apparently. Something about having gone to school with Lord Emsworth, although Lord E. hadn't seemed to be nearly as happy to have Sir Roderick there as Lady Constance was. 

Blair hiccupped again and gave Sir Roderick a rueful smile. "Whatever. Thanks, though." 

Sir Roderick smiled back agreeably and continued, "I believe I heard you mention the name Wooster just now. Are you by chance acquainted with the family?" 

"Me? No. I had Beach mix me up some of the morning-after tonic, or whatever it is, he gave Jim, and Beach got the recipe for the tonic from a guy named Jeeves, who apparently works for a guy named Wooster." Sir Roderick's attention seemed to sharpen, and Blair suddenly felt oddly defensive. "Not that I had a night-before. I mean, nothing I needed a morning-after cure for or anything. It just, uh, seemed like a good plan, you know?" He shrugged. "Better than coffee." More like TNT, actually, but it certainly did give a person a new perspective on life. 

"Ah," Sir Roderick said, "I see." He smiled pleasantly enough again at Blair, but there was no way around it: his eyebrows were lowered thoughtfully and he was looking at Blair like he was running through some sort of mental checklist to see if Blair measured up. 

Right. What was it with this place? First good old Rupert and now brand-new Roderick. There was so much lowered-brow, suspicion-implying facial activity going on that Blair was tempted to call Simon and beg him to get on the next flight to Heathrow. Simon could match suspicious stares and narrow-eyed glares with anybody. 

Sir Roderick inclined his head (which was impressively bald and shiny; thank God Jim hadn't zoned on it yet). "Your friend — Mr. Ellison, isn't it? — seems in decidedly good spirits this morning," he said. 

"He was last night, too," Blair muttered, before he could stop himself. The lingering Brave New World effect of Beach's pick-me-up was starting to lose some of its oomph, apparently. 

"A bit of judicious indulgence when one is on holiday and finds oneself facing a decanter of Emsworth's brandy is quite understandable," Sir Roderick said, sounding indulgent himself. "Emsworth's port is of singular quality as well." 

Blair nodded. He could feel his face making some kind of, well, _face,_ though, and somehow he suspected it wasn't a "Let's hear it for indulgence" kind of face. 

"Ah," Sir Roderick said, in a soothing voice, and cooperatively changed the subject. "Miss Threepwood seems quite taken with your friend." 

Blair would've preferred that he keep talking about Jim's inability to just say no to Lord E.'s brandy. Still, it wasn't like Sir Roderick's new topic was a surprise or anything; Penelope did in fact seem quite taken with Jim. Blair's Beach-provided Brave New World curled up a little further around the edges. "Yeah, she does, doesn't she." 

"And he with her. They do present quite the striking couple, I must say." 

And hey, that was pretty much all she wrote for Beach's pick-me-up. Blair's Brave, New, Shiny (if hiccup-accompanied) World gave up the ghost and shuffled off its mortal coil entirely. 

"Yeah," Blair said glumly, "they do, don't they." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Saturday afternoon.**

"Look," Blair said underneath his breath, "I'm not kidding around here. We really need to talk." 

The rose bushes Blair was currently wandering among remained silent. Jim, last seen half an hour ago on the terrace outside the study (attentively) bent over Penelope as she arranged herself (way too attractively) on a rattan chaise longue, was probably going to remain silent, too, as well as absent. At least the rose bushes had some excuse for refusing to talk with Blair. The only excuse Jim had was — 

…Penelope. Penelope, and wanting to avoid Blair. 

Blair found himself running his hands through his hair and muttering a pithy Ndani proverb that seemed especially apt at the moment. 

"Are you certain you're quite all right, Mr. Sandburg?" a by-now familiar voice asked from just behind Blair's shoulder, and Blair jumped. Didn't Sir Roderick have anything better to do right now than wander through the rose garden? 

Okay, wandering through the rose garden _was_ a legitimate houseguest activity. Catching Blair looking like an idiot was fast becoming a legitimate, and popular, houseguest activity, too, if you counted the four times earlier today that Sir R. had come across Blair talking under his breath to someone who clearly wasn't there. Blair sighed and resisted the urge to run his hands through his hair again. 

"Blair," Blair said to the ubiquitous Sir Roderick. "It's just Blair. And yeah, I'm fine. Peachy, in fact." 

"You seem to be under some stress," Sir Roderick said mildly. "None of my business, of course, but if there's anything I can do?" 

"Thanks, but it's just one of those days. You know how it goes sometimes." Blair aimed a self-deprecating smile at Sir R., who, mild as his manner was, was still eyeing him far too intently. 

"Ah," said Sir Roderick, "yes. We all have those days occasionally." He gestured at the garden surrounding them. "Would you care for company on your stroll?" He paused for a moment, and when Blair didn't answer — the "No, thanks" that was on the tip of Blair's tongue felt rude even though it would most likely sound polite enough — Sir R. added, "Or perhaps you'd rather commune with nature in solitude?" 

"Solitude sounds good," Blair said. Which, belatedly, he realized sounded way more rude than "No, thanks" would have. He continued hastily, "Communing sounds good, I mean. On my own. With nature." With nature, _not_ with an invisible and apparently recalcitrant friend. Definitely not that. Not until Sir Roderick went somewhere else, anyway. Somewhere far away else, preferably. Like, say, Patagonia. 

"I'll leave you to your solitary ruminations, then," Sir Roderick said with a nod, and wandered off through the rose bushes towards the castle (not towards Patagonia, unfortunately) with his hands in his pockets. 

Blair stood there watching him for a few minutes, chewing on his lip. Between Rupert Baxter's perpetual glares of suspicion and Sir Roderick Glossop's genial over-attentiveness, thoughtful "ah's," and keen-eyed scrutiny, he was beginning to feel more than a little uneasy. Which had to be unnecessary; as far as he knew, Jim hadn't zoned at all since Thursday. That meant Rupert didn't have any fresh fodder for whatever suspicions he was harboring, and Sir R. hadn't even seen Jim zoned out once. 

And that was good, right? That the reason Jim's senses were behaving was currently lying on a chaise longue on the terrace outside the study, absorbing Jim's attention to the point that he was too wrapped up in her to let himself get overly fascinated by chandeliers and cop-car sirens and — damn it — tassels, was probably beside the point. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still Saturday afternoon.**

"Sorry, man," Blair said. 

Both the mustache and its owner, who was sitting on the bench beside Blair, slumped. "She wouldn't even take it?" Milton asked plaintively. "You must've bollixed it up somehow." 

"Try to do a guy a favor," Blair said, not quite under his breath. "Hey, it wasn't my fault; she's just really mad at you right now. And sort of… obsessed." 

"Obsessed with that bally rozzer, too right." 

"Okay, yeah, temporarily, but she's not —" 

"And he's obsessed with her. Don't tell me he isn't; every time I look up I see the two of them together. Bloody unfair, I call it, for a chap to have muscles like that and a derring-do profession and then be rolling in it, as well." Milton scowled, or at least Blair thought he was scowling, since it was hard to tell what was going on underneath the extensive shrubbery of the mustache. "The second undergardener's started a book on it, you know. Last I heard it was seven to one your blasted chum would sweet talk Penny into marrying him and going with him when he goes back to the States." 

"What? Okay, that's completely —" 

"I put a tenner the other way, of course, but what I need is some way to bung a spanner in the works, just in case." 

"Seriously, Milt, Jim isn't going to —" 

"Bootsprocket," a distant, testy-sounding voice interrupted, calling from the direction of the topiary garden. "Bootsprocket!" 

Milton sighed. "That's me," he said gloomily. "I'm supposed to be fertilizing something or other. I guess I should get to it, or I'll end up getting the axe. Not that it matters now." 

"'Bootsprocket?'" Blair couldn't quite keep the note of incredulity out of his voice. 

"Guilford Bootsprocket," Milton confirmed, without apparent embarrassment. "My _nom d' jardinier._ Couldn't jolly well have the head gardener happening to mention my real name in Lady C.'s hearing, could I?" 

"I guess not," Blair said, still feeling somewhat incredulous. 

Milton narrowed his eyes, obviously noticing Blair's lack of enthusiastic agreement. "It seemed to go with the mustache," he said a shade defensively. "And I _felt_ it. Chap at my club has an uncle who says you can't just choose any name offhand when you go about being an imposter; you have to _feel_ it." He shrugged. "Of course, Pongo's uncle is as barmy as they come. Good bit of advice there, though, all the same." 

"Huh. Makes sense, I guess. I never really thought about it before," Blair said. Then he added, "'Pongo?'" because he couldn't help himself. 

"Twistleton. You know the old bean?" 

"Um, no," Blair said. 

"Spends a lot of time in the soup, poor fish, thanks to his uncle. Apparently, according to Pongo, you let old Ickenham loose in society at your own peril. Or Pongo's, as it were. Some of the stories Pongo's told me —" Milton stopped short, snapping his fingers. "That's it! That's what we'll do. We'll hide that bloody big pig in Penny's room and I'll rescue her from it. That should be enough to prove I'm not a spineless worm; Penny isn't fond of pigs at all, you know, and finding such a bloody _big_ pig in her room is bound to —" 

_"Bootsprocket!"_ The voice that had earlier evinced from the vicinity of the topiary garden now sounded much nearer and much testier. 

"I'd best get at it, I suppose," Milton said, standing up and totally ignoring the way Blair was sitting there with his mouth gaping open in paralyzed horror. "I'll meet you here later; just before teatime, say. We'll iron out the details then." He turned and, as yet another impatient summons assaulted their ears, booked it. 

Blair shook off the paralysis too late. "Wait," he said uselessly to Milton's rapidly disappearing backside, "you want to… the Empress… _'we'…_ oh, shit." He buried his face in his hands. 

Ten minutes later, when Sir Roderick's voice said, "Not feeling any better yet, then, Mr. Sandburg?" from somewhere above Blair's left shoulder, Blair barely even startled. Not noticeably, anyway. Probably not noticeably. Hopefully probably not noticeably. 

Okay, noticeably. 

He might even have whimpered. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. _Still_ Saturday afternoon. **

He was never buying a can of Reddi-wip again. Or having even plain, vanilla, non-whipped-cream-flavored sex with Jim again. 

Well, no; that wasn't true, not really. But if Jim thought Blair was going to sneak into his bedroom tonight for anything besides a lot of yelling — and not the kind of yelling where you had to bite your lip and bury your face in your pillow so you didn't wake up sweet, deaf (but not deaf enough), sixty-eight-year-old Mrs. Wishinsky in apartment 203 downstairs while Jim was doing that thing with his — 

Okay, so the "I'm never having sex with Jim again (or at least not tonight); let's see how well he likes _that"_ plan wasn't going to get off the ground. 

Providing, of course, that Jim still _wanted_ to have sex with him. Tonight. Or ever. Even though he wasn't, say, _Penelope._

Penelope, who had Jim so wrapped around her little finger that when Blair had shown up on the terrace to enlist Jim's help after Milton had dropped his bombshell an hour or so ago, Jim had tossed an uninterested, "Later, Sandburg," at Blair and blithely shrugged off the urgent hand Blair had placed on his arm. 

Penelope. Starry-eyed, red-haired Penelope, who had Jim so tied up in — 

The rhododendron bush behind Blair's bench cleared its throat. "Is the coast clear, old chap?" it asked. 

Blair jumped. It wasn't much of a jump, more like an upwardly elongated flinch, since the bush was asking in Milton's voice, and Blair had figured he'd show up here soon with teatime fast approaching. But it was still a jump of sorts, and Blair sighed. He glanced at the gardens surrounding his bench. "Nobody here but us chickens," he responded moodily, eyeing the greenery with resignation. Sir Roderick would undoubtedly materialize out of thin air any minute now, just in time to catch Blair talking to a rhododendron bush. _C'est la vie._

"Chickens?" the bush repeated, sounding annoyed. "Weren't you listening earlier? Pigs, old man. Or rather pig, singular, as it were. Penny's quite unbothered by poultry; putting a chicken in her room wouldn't do me a ruddy ounce of good." 

"'Yeah, well, about the pig thing: no way am I —" 

The bush grunted. 

"— going to help you hide Lord Emsworth's pig anywhere, especially —" 

The bush grunted again. And snuffled. 

"— not in Penelope's… Milton," Blair said, quite calmly under the circumstances, "please tell me that the Empress isn't in that bush with you." 

"Can't do that, old bean, sorry," Milton answered, sounding pretty cheerful about it. "It was a case of a bird in hand, you know. Or, in this case," Milton said with a chortle, "a pig in hand, what? Wellbeloved went off to the village and won't be back until late, if my sources are right, and no one else was around, and it turns out to be quite simple to convey a pig from one spot to another if you hold a food bag a few inches in front of its snout. Donkey and carrot, you know." 

Blair ran both hands through his hair, not that it helped any. "'Wellbeloved?'" he asked, which was beside the point — the point being the pig in the bushes with Milton, the _purloined_ pig — but he needed a moment to think. 

"Wellbeloved, the pig man," Milton said, "who's off to the village, as I said. And everyone else will be at tea in a few minutes, which makes this the ideal time to smuggle the pig into Penny's room." 

"Or hey, here's a thought: the ideal time to smuggle the Empress back to her pigsty." 

"You can't back out on me now," Milton said, "it wouldn't be sporting of you." 

Blair threw his hands up in the air in frustration. "Back out on you? I wasn't ever in this with you in the first place, Milton. Why do you need me, anyway?" 

"That's hardly the old school spirit," Milton said reproachfully. "I can't chance Penny seeing me putting the pig into her room myself, now can I? That would take the luster right off a rescue. Penny's no fool, even if she's been letting that blasted rozzer chum of yours lead her around far too much." 

"He's not the one who's…" Blair trailed off with a sigh. "You know what, never mind. You said everybody will be busy having tea, so you should be perfectly safe on your own if you're really determined to do this." 

"I am," Milton said firmly, to the accompaniment of a grunt that sounded (to Blair, at any rate) somewhat skeptical, "and you're bloody well going to help me. You've already let the side down once, you know, by mucking up the business with my note to Penny." 

" _So_ not my fault, Milton," Blair said. 

"Well, who's fault was it, then?" 

Before Blair could answer, Milton went on, "Anyway, if you don't help me, I'll track down Lord E. and tell him I saw you sneaking about with his pig, up to no good, and when he toddles off to the pigsty and finds it pigless, he'll chuck you and your snake-in-the-grass friend out in the cold. Or if he doesn't, Lady C. will. It wouldn't take much for me to convince her you've got a few bricks loose in your ballast, not when she already suspects as much. That's why she got Glossop down here, you know." 

"Sir Roderick? What does Sir Roderick have to do with —" 

"Glossop's a loony-doctor, of course. _The_ loony-doctor; right up there with Freud, I gather." 

"Loony-doctor?" Oh, crap. 

"It's all over the servants' hall: a bit of especially juicy gossip, thanks to the time Glossop was supposed to show up and mingle with the castle inmates so he could discreetly vet one of Lady C.'s guests, but Pongo's uncle turned up in his place, impostering him. All due to a falling-out between Glossop and Lord E. that Glossop didn't come; an unsavory incident when they were at school, or some such, rumor has it. Not that Pongo's uncle didn't do a buck-up job of pretending to be him, according to everything I hear." 

The bush cleared its throat in an ominous manner. "But that Glossop's here in person this time means something, and the something it means is that Lady C. wants an expert opinion on the mental health of one or more of her current crop of houseguests. Extrapolate from that as you will, but it doesn't look all that good for you as it is, old chap. Still, it would be far worse were you to be officially accused of, say, pignapping. Well-adjusted houseguests don't tend to kidnap their host's pigs, or even fraternize with them unnecessarily." 

"Okay, whoa, time out," Blair said. Sir Roderick had to have been invited here to check Jim out, thanks to all those zones Jim had fallen into the first couple of days they were here. That was bad, but it was wasn't _really_ a problem, right? Since Jim hadn't zoned out since Sir R. got here? And anyway, Sir R. had been spending all his time shadowing Blair, not Jim — 

— shadowing Blair and repeatedly catching him talking to ( _trying_ to talk to) someone who wasn't anywhere within eyesight, which probably wasn't normal behavior for a mentally stable person in Sir Roderick's book. Or in anyone else in the mental health profession's book, for that matter. 

Oh, _crap._

Blair ran his hands through his hair again. If Sir Roderick and/or Milton convinced Lady Constance that Blair had gone off the rails, _'oh, crap'_ would be an understatement, since all it would take to badly screw things up would be for Lady C. to call Nigel-in-Wales and have him tell Naomi she needed to come take custody of her crazy son who talked to himself and stole large, unwieldy pigs belonging to his host. 

Not that Naomi would believe he was really crazy. But she'd find a way to blame the whole mess on him living and working with Jim, and the fallout from that wasn't something Blair wanted to experience, especially since he and Jim would end up experiencing it for months. He knew Naomi, and detaching with love wouldn't apply to something like this. 

Blair dropped his head into his hands with a sigh. Right. So, on the one hand, he had: not participating in Milton's idiotic pig-napping — well, pig- _borrowing_ — plan and definitely ending up screwed, thanks to Milton's alternate plan of lying through his teeth to Lord E. and Lady C. 

On the other hand… on the other hand, if he helped Milton insert the Empress into Penelope's room, there was at least a _chance_ he wouldn't end up screwed. Not a very big one, but… 

But the thing was, he didn't want to give Naomi any ammunition to use against him being with Jim. When she got over being pissed off at cops as a whole, he wanted her blessing, or at least her acceptance. He did _not_ want a long-term, passive-aggressive campaign of "You're so much better than this, sweetie" disapproval. So, if there was any way he could lessen the odds of Naomi getting dragged into this… 

"It's getting on teatime," Milton said. "So what's it to be, old chap? Help two sundered hearts reunite, or refuse to lend a hand and find yourself and your rozzer friend sitting at the station in Market Blandings in two ticks with your luggage piled around your feet? Doesn't actually matter that much to me, you know. Either way, your rozzer's out of the picture and I'll have a chance with Penny again." 

And there was that, too. If Milton's half-assed plan somehow worked and Penelope ended up in his arms with all forgiven, she'd stop being all warmly dreamy-eyed at Jim. 

Unless Jim was the guy whose arms she found first after her encounter with the pig. But Jim wouldn't be hanging around Penelope's bedroom, he wasn't _that_ wrapped up in her. And surely Milton had a good hiding spot planned, so he could be the first to rush to Penelope's rescue. So… 

"Man, I hope I don't regret this," Blair said, addressing his feet rather than Milton's rhododendron bush. He lifted his head, and his voice. "Okay, Milton, I'm in. Sundered Hearts 'R Us." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Saturday Afternoon. Yes, still. But not for much longer.**

Blair ran his hand — his free hand, the hand that wasn't holding the bag of pig chow — through his hair and allowed himself a couple of deep, calming breaths. The library's open French doors loomed only a couple of yards away, which was a) good and b) not so good. Really, really not so good. 

In the 'good' column: they'd made it this far without anyone noticing them. Apparently everybody was too busy enjoying their afternoon cuppa to keep an eye out for a pig, a Mustache, and the Mustache's patsy slinking across the grounds from bush to tree to hedge to the usefully dense shrubbery near the library's French doors. 

'Slinking' only applied to him and Milton, of course, since you couldn't exactly call the Empress's forward progress _slinking._ Shuffling, sure, and snuffling, but not slinking. Still, they hadn't been caught yet, and that had to go down in the 'good' column. 

In the 'not so good' column: Blair was about to sneak around inside the castle without Milton but with a really big pig, a pig he was associating with under less than kosher circumstances. Which was clearly not good. 

_So_ not good. Really big illicit pigs inside castles were about twelve levels of awkward up from really big illicit pigs outside castles. Pigs weren't particularly discreet, for one thing. For another thing — 

"I'll just be off, then, and get into position in case Penny comes back to her room early. There's a splendid salvia beside her window; large and bushy, capital cover," Milton whispered, breaking into Blair's gloomy thoughts. "Remember, I'm counting on you, old bean. Don't let the side down." 

"Counting on me, right; that's great," Blair answered distractedly, even though once again he was talking to himself, Milton having already vanished around the corner. 

He looked down at the Empress, who was nosing the food bag with decided impatience, and up at the doors that opened into the library. 

So. Very. Not. Good. 

This was all Jim's fault. Jim, who was so wrapped up in Penelope — Penelope, who was supposed to be wrapped up in Milton — Milton, who preferred to blackmail innocent bystanders into potentially disastrous pignappings rather than face down a lorgnette — 

Jim, who was so wrapped up in Penelope. 

"Jim," Blair muttered, regardless of whether or not muttering to an invisible Jim would somehow conjure up Sir Roderick, "I'm _really not_ going to have sex with you ever again. I mean it. You are shit out of luck, man." 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still Saturday afternoon —  
but, as promised, not for much longer. **

Third door on the right, Milton had said. Penelope's room was the third door on the right down this hallway. Apparently he'd been hanging around in front of her windows at night, ducking behind the salvia bush anytime she appeared, like the spineless worm she'd called him, and knew the layout. Which was fortunate, since Blair hadn't even known Penelope's room was on the first floor (or ground floor, Britishly speaking) and not upstairs like his and Jim's rooms were, and he could hardly go around searching for somebody to ask for directions. 

Okay, first door… second door… third door. Open the third door, coax the Empress in, and Houston, we have pig delivery, safe and — 

"Mr. Sandburg. And, ah… _pig,"_ Sir Roderick said. 

Sir Roderick. In Penelope's room. 

Sir Roderick. Sitting in an armchair that was pulled up in front of the writing desk near the window. 

In Penelope's room. Sir Roderick. 

No. 

Seriously, just no. 

Sir Roderick raised an eyebrow inquiringly. "May I ask to what I owe this pleasure?" 

He could _ask,_ sure. Sure, he could ask. Of course, actually answering him was kind of beyond Blair at the moment, because what the _crap_ was Sir Roderick doing sitting at the writing desk in Penelope's room? 

…in Penelope's room, which seemed to contain a sizable assortment of clothing and accessories that — unless she was secretly into cross-dressing — obviously belonged to someone of the male persuasion. Someone like, say, Sir Roderick. 

_Wrong room, wrong room, wrong room,_ Blair's mind chanted silently, and completely unhelpfully, as he gave Sir Roderick a tiny wave. "Hey," he said, feebly. 

The conversation, such as it was, died off. Sir Roderick was looking at him with an air of courteous expectation, unmistakably waiting for an explanation, and Blair didn't _have_ an explanation. At least not one that both sounded sane and wouldn't deep-six Milton. Despite everything, Blair couldn't bring himself to do that to Milton. Murder Milton later on? That was definitely on the agenda, Milton and his _third door on the right,_ but rat on him… no. 

And anyway, even if he _could_ bring himself to throw Milton overboard, Milton wouldn't take it lying down; he'd find a way to blame it all on Blair so he wouldn't tarnish his Knight in Shining Armor ('Rescuer from Pigs' Division) image with Penelope. Milton seemed like a bottom-line, ends-justify-the-means type of guy, after all. 

So yeah, no explanation. Which was pretty embarrassing, since Blair could always come up with an explanation, for anything, under any circumstances. Just not, apparently, when the circumstances involved Milton Greaves, an unauthorized pig, an eminent loony-doctor, the wrong room, and never, ever, _ever_ having sex with Jim again. 

After what seemed like twenty years, give or take a year, Sir Roderick cleared his throat. "While it was thoughtful of you to bring me a pig, and such a fine, large pig at that, I fear I'm not quite prepared to receive it properly. Or perhaps you were merely airing your pig, and mistook my room for your own?" 

"She's not my pig; she's Lord Emsworth's pig," Blair said reflexively, like _that_ was helpful, and Sir Roderick made a considering sort of "I see" sound. 

The conversation turned up its toes once more, and Blair, still coming up blank on the plausible explanations front, was on the verge of blurting out, "You were supposed to be having tea! Milton said everybody would be having tea! _Why aren't you having tea?"_ when Sir Roderick cleared his throat again and spoke. 

"I'm afraid your pig — forgive me, Emsworth's pig — has left us. Perhaps you would…" Sir Roderick's words blurred into unintelligible background noise as Blair looked around frantically. 

No pig. Right. _No pig._

The food bag was lying on the floor near Blair's feet, empty, and a vase on a low table against the wall had been overturned and was lying in a puddle of water along with a few broken flower stems. 

And the door to the hallway was standing open, the door that Blair must not have closed all the way and through which, clearly, the Empress had left, having no further interest in a location that had already provided its gustatory all. 

Shit. Shit, shit, _shit._

But okay, something could still be salvaged here. He just needed to catch the pig and lead her to Penelope's room, whichever room that really was, and… well, think about Sir Roderick later. Much, much later. 

Fortunately, Blair was still close to the door, having frozen only a few steps into the room at the sight of Sir Roderick, and it only took a second or two to dash out into the hallway and start scanning for errant pigs. 

It only took a second or two longer to spot the errant pig, and Blair let out a sigh of relief. The Empress was ambling along a few yards down the hallway with a couple of flower stems still sticking out the sides of her mouth. Evidently she was into flowers, which was helpful, since there was some kind of pedestal thing right outside Sir Roderick's door that was topped with a flower-filled vase. 

Blair had just grabbed the flowers to use as a bribe and started off in pursuit of Lord E.'s pig, when he heard Penelope's voice coming from around the hallway corner towards which the Empress was headed. 

Penelope. Here, in the hallway, where the Empress was. Penelope, _here,_ before he could get the pig safely into her room. 

Perfect. What _else_ could go wrong this afternoon? 

"…I only borrowed it from your study because I needed it for pressing some roses, Uncle Clarence. I didn't think it would be a problem; it didn't look the sort of book anyone would miss." 

There was a noise that sounded like someone trying to reply but sputtering too much to get the words out, then a choked sound. Then, "Whiffle _On the Care of the Pig_ — pressing roses — the sort of book that wouldn't be —" 

And then Penelope and Lord Emsworth rounded the corner and came into sight. And Penelope shrieked, piercingly, and shrieked again. 

Blair's previous character assessment of the Empress, which had run along the lines of "placid" and "slow-motion" and "not a pig to bet on at the racetrack," flew out the window the moment Penelope started shrieking. The Empress turned her corkscrew tail on a dime and headed back down the hall towards Blair at what could only be called a full-out and majorly impressive gallop, triggering a sort of domino effect: 

— Lord Emsworth started galloping down the hall after the Empress, cooing pig-oriented endearments, and Blair pressed himself against the wall to avoid being trampled. 

— The door to the second room on the right opened and Milton — sans mustache, and hey, he kind of looked like a young Jimmy Cagney, who would've known — practically leaped out and headed towards Penelope at a pace to rival the Empress's. Penelope stopped shrieking and flew into Milton's arms. 

— Rupert Baxter came around the corner at the opposite end of the hallway and the Empress barreled into him, knocking him down flat. 

— Rupert yelled. The Empress put back her ears and galloped even faster, rounding the corner to vanish from sight. Lord E. hurdled Rupert's prone body and rounded the corner after her. 

— From a distance (but not nearly a far-enough-away distance), Blair heard Lady Constance exclaiming, "Clarence! What on earth!" 

A suspended and undoubtedly all too temporary moment of nearly peaceful silence followed Lady Constance's exclamation. Then Beach appeared — not galloping — and sailed past the entwined Milton and Penelope like a large, stately ship, coming into port right where Blair was standing holding his fistful of dripping-wet flowers with his back still pressed firmly against the wall. "A telephone call for you, sir," Beach said. "If you would care to follow me?" 

Blair glanced around the hallway. 

In the 'plus' column: 

    a) Milton and Penelope. 

In the _'oh, crap'_ column: 

    a) Sir Roderick, standing in the doorway to his room and looking every inch the loony-doctor who had temporarily let his loony, and said loony's purloined pig, escape, and was ready to make amends for that lapse post-haste. 

    b) Rupert Baxter, still prone and glaring at Blair like him getting flattened by the Empress was all Blair's fault. Which, okay, it was. Technically. 

    c) Lady Constance, who'd appeared on the scene a couple of moments ago, spotted Milton and Penelope in their clinch and attempted to verbally skewer them with a frigidly horrified, "Penelope, what is the meaning of this?" (a question Penelope was obviously far too occupied to answer), and who was currently standing beside her brother's personal secretary's still-prone body and saying, "Oh, Mr. Baxter!" in a distraught voice. 

So, yeah, Blair would be pretty happy to follow Beach. Anywhere. Right now. And the faster and farther away the better. "You bet I would," he said to Beach. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Early Saturday evening. (Finally.)**

Blair chewed his lip and eyed the door to his room with what he hoped was completely unnecessary paranoia. He'd locked the door, after all, so there really wasn't any need to drag the desk, or the bed, over in front of it to serve as a barricade. Right? 

Right. 

He was giving Milton a run for his money in the spineless worm category, he knew that. But discretion was the better part of valor, and retreating here after the phone call this afternoon to think — and to avoid Sir Roderick, Rupert Baxter, Lady Constance, and Lord Emsworth — had made sense at the time. Just like staying here to avoid Sir Roderick, Rupert Baxter, Lady Constance, and Lord Emsworth made sense now. Just like asking Beach to bring him a sandwich or something later on would make sense later on, since staying as far away as possible from dinner (which would be dinner with, presumably, Sir Roderick, Rupert Baxter, Lady Constance, and Lord Emsworth) certainly seemed like the better part of valor, too. 

So did not seeing Jim just yet. Not that Blair didn't want to talk with Jim, _need_ to talk with Jim, but this whole disaster wouldn't have happened if Jim hadn't been so Penelope-preoccupied, and Blair needed a little space. Not much space and not long-term space, no way, but a couple of hours' worth of space. To think. 

Anyway, if Jim wanted to talk this evening (and fat chance of that, considering Jim's recent track record), it wasn't like he wouldn't be able to find Blair. Unless, that is, he was too busy fending off questions from Sir Roderick, questions like "How often does Mr. Sandburg lose touch with reality in the course of an average week?" and "Is this the first time Mr. Sandburg has shown an unusual fondness for the company of pigs?" 

Blair sighed. They'd talk later tonight, him and Jim. He'd sneak over to Jim's room like he had every night since their first night here, and he'd yell at Jim, a lot, and then they'd _talk_

And not have sex ever again. 

Okay, the no-sex-ever-again thing probably wasn't going to last very long. But he'd yell at Jim first, and they'd talk after that, and _then_ they'd not do the no-sex-ever-again thing. 

Probably, anyway. 

If Jim was lucky. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Later Saturday evening.**

The sandwich Blair had hoped for turned out to be a large tray heavily loaded with dishes and bottles, delivered by one of the footmen (Thomas, who was a really nice guy with twin three-year-old daughters) and accompanied by Beach. 

Of course, the arrival of Beach and Thomas and the tray meant that Blair had to unlock his door and open it. Which meant he had to look out into the hallway for a moment, which meant he got an eyeful of Charles (another of the footmen, also a nice guy but not very talkative) ensconced in a chair directly across the hall from Blair's door. 

Which meant… what? Charles hadn't been there the last time Blair had been in the hallway, late this afternoon. Neither had the chair. Blair gave Charles a little wave and a puzzled smile and closed the bedroom door. Then he turned to Beach. "Beach?" he said. "Hey. Why is Charles sitting in the hallway?" The words had barely left his mouth when he realized what was going on. He ran his hands through his hair and grimaced. "Oh. I get it. They figured I needed a jailor, huh?" 

Beach was supervising Thomas's handling of the tray and its contents with a sedate eye. "A colorful description, sir, and perhaps not inaccurate. It is my understanding that the consensus was that it would be prudent to forestall any further episodes of, as I believe it was phrased by His Lordship, 'lunatic behavior' on your part." 

"Great," Blair muttered. "Is Charles going to sit there all night?" 

"Only until he is relieved by Mr. Baxter. Mr. Baxter has volunteered for an extended shift after dinner. He has requested that sandwiches and tea be delivered to his post here at midnight and that coffee be delivered at half past three." 

"Great," Blair said again, morosely. Rupert Baxter? All night? How the heck was he going to get to Jim's room unobserved with a highly caffeinated Rupert Baxter sitting outside his room and staring fixedly, and suspiciously, at the door? 

Wait. 'Highly caffeinated.' At some point, Rupert would have to hit the head; no matter how efficient the Baxter bladder was, it could only hold so much tea and coffee. So all Blair needed to do was — 

"If I may be so bold, sir?" Beach said, clearing his throat. "I would recommend exercising caution. Mr. Baxter claims that you've caused him deliberate bodily harm on several occasions and has proposed to arm himself accordingly." 

"Whoa, what? Caused him deliberate bodily… _Arm himself?"_ Blair ran his hands through his hair again, possibly with more emphasis this time. "Perfect. Just perfect." 

"That will be all, Thomas," Beach said to Thomas and stood there in dignified silence until Thomas had exited, at which point he seemed to amp up his dignity level even higher before he continued speaking. "Should you feel inclined to enjoy the night air later this evening, sir, I would suggest the ivy; the vines are quite strong. It would, of course, be wise to avoid the drainpipe, as that is far less sturdy." 

Ivy… drainpipe, sturdy… oh. This time Blair scrubbed a hand over his face instead of through his hair. Seriously? Beach was suggesting he climb out the window? And what, flee for his life? 

"The ivy is quite sturdy on all the walls, sir, should you feel inclined to enjoy the night air from elsewhere within the castle." 

Okay, hold on a minute. 'From elsewhere within the castle?' That didn't sound like Beach was suggesting that Blair flee; it sounded like Beach was suggesting that Blair could climb down from his window in order to climb up to another window, although _why_ Beach thought Blair might want to — 

Oh. So much for discretion. At least for his and Jim's discretion; Beach's seemed to be doing a bang-up job so far. "Thanks," Blair said, somewhat weakly, "that's, uh, good to know." He pulled himself together a little. "Beach, do you know if Penelope… um, what's going on with Penelope?" 

"I couldn't say, sir. I believe the overall situation remains unresolved," Beach answered. He turned a benevolent eye on Blair. "However, it appears likely that I shall rake in a tidy sum on my five pound investment, as Miss Penelope does seem disinclined at this juncture to elope with Mr. Ellison." 

  

**Blandings Castle. Saturday night.**

Climbing down ivy vines sucked big-time, no matter how sturdy Beach said they were. Climbing up ivy vines sucked even more, especially when Blair wasn't absolutely certain that he was aiming for the right room. 

On the positive side, he could take comfort in the fact that even if he ended up in the wrong room, it would just be him ending up in the wrong room, not him and a very large, illicitly borrowed pig. 

On the negative side — 

The vine Blair was currently clutching trembled a bit under his hands, and Blair froze. He couldn't quite keep from glancing down, however, and shit, the ground was way down there. _Way._ He closed his eyes for a couple of moments and took in half a dozen deep, calming breaths before he cautiously started climbing again. 

Okay, on the negative side, there was the strong possibility, in the all too immediate future, of acquiring either a broken neck or broken bones of a less vital but still meaningful nature. 

So far, the negative side had it hands down over the positive side. 

But why stop there, right? There was also the possibility of encountering Sir Roderick, if only because when _wasn't_ there the possibility of encountering Sir Roderick? The guy showed up everywhere. 

Also weighing in on the negative side: Rupert Baxter, who was almost as ubiquitous as Sir Roderick and currently loaded for bear. Sure, the possibility of encountering Rupert Baxter in the immediate future wasn't nearly as strong as the possibility of getting painfully dumped by the ivy, since right about now Rupert should be tucking into his sandwiches and tea in the hallway outside Blair's bedroom. But considering the way things worked at Blandings Castle, it wasn't exactly statistically insignificant. 

On the other hand, to return to the positive side, wasn't that Jim at the window Blair was climbing towards? Which was only a yard or so away now, and Blair let out a deep breath of relief. He was almost there. Almost with Jim. 

The vine trembled again, and Blair tore his eyes away from the welcome sight of Jim and fastened them back on the increasingly shaky ivy, gritting his teeth and mentally crossing his fingers as he kept climbing. Why couldn't his and Jim's rooms have been at ground level, anyway? Like Penelope's room? Not to mention Sir Roderick's room? 

Penelope's room. Penelope, right. If he didn't end up getting dumped by the ivy and turned into an involuntary, smashed-to-smithereens lawn ornament, he and Jim were definitely going to have a little talk about — 

"What do you mean, you're never having sex with me again?" 

Hands grabbed Blair's shoulders and yanked him up and inside the window. Jim's hands, of course, attached to Jim, who was now standing just in front of Blair, wearing a pretty impressive frown. 

And pajama pants, and nothing else that Blair could see, except for the moonlight that was highlighting his abs and his arms and his chest… 

No, wait. That was _not_ how this was going to go. Not yet, anyway. Blair huffed, which was partly due to breathlessness from the climb and his narrowly avoided incarnation as a busted-up lawn ornament, true, but was also due to some thoroughly justified annoyance. "Out of everything I've said to you over the course of the past day and a half, the only thing you heard was that I'm never having sex with you again?" 

Ignoring Blair's question (big surprise there), Jim gave Blair a pointedly flat, and not entirely flattering, look. "You don't really mean that." 

He was standing deep inside Blair's personal space, so ridiculously ripped, and so… so _Jim,_ and no, of course Blair didn't mean it. 

They _were_ going to discuss some of this stuff first, though. Like Penelope. And like Jim ignoring Blair. And like… Penelope. 

Blair stepped back from Jim a couple of feet and crossed his arms over his chest, glaring at Jim. "So what happened with Penelope?" 

The corner of Jim's mouth quirked up slightly. "She left with the guy with the mustache, only he didn't have the mustache anymore. Lady Constance is pissed off, although I don't think the absence of the mustache had anything to do with that." 

Which wasn't exactly what Blair had meant by his question, but before he could point that out, the quirk grew more pronounced, and Jim continued, "Emsworth's pissed off, too. You might want to avoid him for the foreseeable future. Turns out kidnapping his prize pig and delivering her to Glossop — or trying to deliver her to Glossop — gets the old geezer going." Jim scratched the side of his jaw thoughtfully. "Baxter… well, if I were you, I'd avoid him for the foreseeable future too, and then some. Unless you're wearing Kevlar, anyway. On the bright side, Glossop's not pissed off, but he _is_ looking forward to digging deeper into your neuroses. Let me tell you, Sandburg, dinner was a load of fun. Good call giving it a miss." 

Blair felt his arms tighten across his chest. It wasn't like his avoiding dinner with the Blandings Castle gang had been some kind of light-hearted whim or something. And it wasn't like he'd _wanted_ to tick off Lord Emsworth. The old guy was really nice. 

Unless, apparently, you borrowed his pig, however unenthusiastically. "I wasn't trying to deliver the Empress to Sir Roderick, Jim, I was —" 

"I don't care what you were doing, Chief. In fact, I don't want to know. Not right now, anyway. I _do,_ however, want to have sex. Now." 

Jim hadn't moved, but he might as well have; Blair could feel the heat of his body, practically feel his hands beginning to roam over… 

No, no, _no._ Not yet. First they had to… there was something about… talking about… 

Wait. _Wait._ Blair shook himself mentally, hard. Penelope, right, that was it. Penelope and Jim, and Jim so assiduously ignoring Blair and not ignoring Penelope. They had to talk about that. First. Before they had sex. Right. 

Blair crossed his arms over his chest again. He didn't remember uncrossing them, but that was Jim for you; he could take out all your defenses simply by being Jim. "So you're not upset that Penelope went off with Milton?" he said, and if it sounded a little insecure, well, okay. He wasn't _really_ insecure; Jim knew that, and with the day Blair had had, Jim would just have to cut him some slack. 

"Milton? That's the guy with the mustache, then without the mustache?" Blair nodded briefly, and Jim shrugged. "Why would I be upset? She's happy, at least I assume she is, and she deserves to be happy." 

"I thought you wanted to make her happy yourself." Crap, that'd sounded _too_ insecure. 

"Sure, you did," Jim said easily, like Blair was just pulling his leg. 

Blair frowned. "I kept trying to warn you that she was getting a crush on you, and you kept ignoring me." 

"It was kind of cute, actually, that crush. And flattering, I admit." 

"You kept ignoring me, and you got drunk rather than talk to me." 

Jim shrugged again. "That brandy was amazing, Chief. Guess we're lucky I didn't zone out on it, what with both Glossop and Baxter in the same room with us; Glossop would be wanting to dig into my psyche for neuroses, not just yours." 

"Yeah, lucky it's just me," Blair said, maybe a little more sarcastically than he'd intended to. It was great that Sir Roderick hadn't caught Jim in a zone or seen him doing any sentinel stuff, sure, absolutely. But if Jim hadn't spent the past thirty-some hours ignoring Blair so dedicatedly, Sir Roderick most likely wouldn't be wanting to dig into Blair's psyche right now, either. Blair scowled at Jim. "So why _did_ you keep ignoring me yesterday and today? I know you had to have heard me at least some of the times I tried to get your attention." 

"Mmm," Jim said. He looked at Blair appraisingly. "Tell you what: we have sex first, and I'll explain that later." 

Blair felt his eyebrows shoot up. "You've got to be kidding me." 

"No," Jim said. beginning to advance slowly and predatorily and (unfairly) convincingly. "We've got sheets to mess up. _Now."_ His predatory expression turned a shade more intense, and he nodded his head towards the wall closest to Blair, and oh man, low blow. "Or we could mess up that wall hanging instead." 

Totally low blow; they needed to finish talking first. But Jim was right there, and so was the bed, and so was the _wall,_ and Pavlov's dogs had nothing on Blair as far as walls were concerned, and… 

And hey, talking was probably overrated, anyway. At least talking right _now._

  

**Blandings Castle. Later Saturday night (or, actually, very early Sunday morning).**

"You should've told me, Jim. You know how screwed up things get when you don't tell me this stuff." Blair nudged Jim's calf with his foot. Nudged, or possibly kicked; lightly, but, he hoped, expressively. 

"You already knew I was zoning every ten seconds, Chief. Dialing down my senses seemed like the only way to go." 

"Dialing down your senses and spending all your time with Penelope, you mean." 

Jim rolled over onto his side so that he was facing Blair. He didn't look nearly as guilty and sorry about everything as he ought to. "Friday afternoon wasn't my fault," he said, without any visible shame. "Penny said she needed to pick up something in the village and asked me to help; what was I supposed to say to that? And then she wanted to take me sightseeing, and I couldn't think of a good enough excuse to get off the hook." 

"Or a good enough excuse to not get drunk Friday night? And act like she was the greatest thing since… I don't know, Santana?" 

"Yeah, I shouldn't have given in to that brandy. I remember telling Penny a few things about the job and thinking she was kind of like Daryl, all wide-eyed about what it's like to be a cop and work in Major Crime; and wondering whether Simon would be upset if she pulled a Daryl on him and decided she wanted to be a cop herself. Not that that makes any sense now, but it seemed to make sense at the time, thanks to the brandy." 

Blair felt like nudging — or kicking — Jim again; this time out of disbelief. "You're kidding, right? You were thinking about Daryl and Simon with Penelope hanging on your arm and your every word?" 

"I wish I _was_ kidding. Brandy does strange things to me sometimes, Chief." 

"Okay, fine." It was sort of an explanation; one that Blair could work with, anyway. "That was Friday. Moving on to yesterday —" 

"Yesterday I was probably being kind of a jerk." 

"You think?" Blair glared at Jim, but without as much heat as the situation warranted. Jim wasn't usually big on admitting he'd been a jerk and when he did actually admit it, the admission was practically an apology all on its own. 

"I didn't intend to be quite as much of one as I ended up being, though. You were just supposed to spend a little time thinking about whole situation with Penny; you weren't supposed to get stuck in the middle of some stupid-ass scheme involving the guy with the mustache and Emsworth's pig." 

Well, the second part of that was something, at least. The first part… "You wanted to make me spend time thinking about you spending time with Penelope?" 

Jim sighed. "I wanted you to stop looking all smug and amused every time Lady Constance maneuvered me into spending time alone with Penny, trying to marry her off to my father's money." He eyed Blair pointedly. "Which she wouldn't have been doing in the first place if you'd kept your mouth shut about Dad being rich." 

"I told you why I told her that." 

"And I'm explaining why I thought it wouldn't hurt to make you regret that just a little. Misery loves company, after all." 

Blair rolled his eyes. "Oh, come off it. You weren't miserable hanging out with Penelope; admit it. At least not after that first walk you took with her in the rose garden." 

"No, I wasn't. But she's not you, Chief. I can't say that spending two weeks in your ancestral castle with your barrel-of-fun relatives is my idea of an outstanding vacation, but since we're here, I figure I should at least get to spend my time with you, not Lady Constance and her matchmaking plans, and not her niece and _her_ rebound-romance plans." 

"So you're saying you spent yesterday not spending time with me — brushing me off — so you could spend more time with me? That's really twisted logic, Jim." It was also making Blair feel better than he had in a while: Jim hadn't actually wanted to spend so much time with Penelope; he'd wanted to be with Blair. Which Blair hadn't _really_ doubted, but it was still kind of nice to hear. Even if Jim's logic sucked. 

"I already said I was probably being a jerk, didn't I? Besides, I have to put some of the blame on Beach's pick-me-up." 

Blair stared at Jim. "You're using Beach's pick-me-up as an excuse? That's not funny, Jim." 

"I'm not trying to be funny. That thing was lethal, Chief. It felt good at the time, sure; at least it felt good as soon as the room stopped spinning, but it kept coming back at me." 

Blair narrowed his eyes. "Coming back at you? What do you mean? It bothered your senses?" 

"Maybe it would have if I hadn't had them turned down. It bothered _me,_ though. You tried it, right? It didn't bother you." 

Blair rubbed his forehead, trying not to feel like he'd fallen down a rabbit-hole. After all, Jim didn't always react to normal things, like the ingredients of that pick-me-up, the same way most other people did. "It felt like it blew the top off my head for a couple of moments, then gave me this nice, everything's wonderful afterglow for a little while," he said to Jim. "And hiccups. That's all." 

Jim's expression turned aggrieved. "Yeah, well, it did more than that to me. I ate kippers, Chief. _Kippers._ That pick-me-up made it seem like a good idea." 

Of course, blaming Tabasco sauce and raw eggs could only take a guy so far. Blair scowled at Jim. "Let me get this straight: you're equating choosing to eat kippers for breakfast with choosing to ignore me the rest of the day. You realize how dumb that sounds." 

"Yeah, but it's true. That super-charged Tabasco sauce, or whatever the hell it was, kept coming back at me all day like some kind of psychoactive buzz." Jim looked like he wanted to hunt down Beach's bottle of Tabasco sauce and shoot it. "Every time it happened, I'd end up with some kind of great idea that really wasn't a great idea after all, like the kippers, or ignoring the way you were trying to warn me off from helping Penny in the morning, or giving you the cold shoulder when you tried to get my attention on the terrace yesterday afternoon." 

He scrubbed a hand over the top of his head and down his face. "I remember standing there on the terrace thinking that if I ignored you then, you'd stick around the next time Penny wanted to be alone with me. I also remember that you seemed pretty urgent about needing to talk with me, and that it just convinced me how smart my plan was. Pretty fucked up, I know." 

Which was just too ridiculous to be true. "Right," Blair said, shoveling all the (considerable) sarcasm he had at his disposal at this particular moment into his voice. "You really expect me to believe you aren't making this up, trying to get back in my good graces? Come on, Jim." 

"I'm telling you, Sandburg, it was… weird. Like I kept getting shaken out of myself, the whole fucking day." 

"Uh-huh. The whole day. And you never once thought it would be a good idea to tell me, even when you weren't in the middle of one of your… Tabasco mind-control episodes?" 

"Yeah, I should've told you, of course I know that. But every time I'd start to realize I needed to tell you what was happening, I'd go under again, and telling you would seem like the worst idea I'd ever had." 

This was totally too ridiculous to be true. But it was also Jim, and Jim wouldn't lie to him, and Jim _did_ have unpredictable and strange reactions to things occasionally, and — 

— and maybe it _wasn't_ too ridiculous to be true. Jim deserved the benefit of the doubt, at least. Blair sighed, partly at Jim and partly at himself. "So it's gone now? You're feeling okay again?" 

"I think having sex cured me. No, I think _thinking_ about having sex cured me; the last time I felt anything weird was just before I saw you climbing up those ivy vines." 

Blair snorted. "You know what I think? I think you're an asshole. I also think I need to get the recipe from Beach, so we can run some tests and figure out what was going on. If you aren't making all this up." 

Jim gave Blair an exasperated-looking frown. "You wound me, Chief." 

"You're not the guy who ended up holed up in his room trying to avoid a bunch of pissed-off people because he'd been blackmailed into pig misappropriation." 

Jim's frown deepened, but it looked like he was directing the frown at himself this time and not at Blair."Yeah, about that —" 

"Yeah, about that. Where were you, after it all went down? You could've come to my room any time." 

Jim grimaced. "I spent the first hour trying to defend your honor against practically half the people in this place. After that… all I can say is that the Tabasco kept kicking in, and it seemed like the smart thing to do was to humor Glossop and his so-called professional opinion that disturbing you would likely _further_ disturb you, Conover candidate that you are. Not that I would normally give a rat's ass about Glossop's opinion; I shouldn't have let it go down that way, Chief, Tabasco sauce or no Tabasco sauce." 

Blair found himself staring at Jim again. "Is that an apology? An actual, you're-admitting-you-screwed-up apology?" 

"Pretty much," Jim said, with the almost-not-there smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle and did seriously unfair things to just about every part of Blair's anatomy. "And so is this," he added, cupping Blair's jaw with his hand and leaning in for a leisurely, undemanding kiss. 

Undemanding at first, that is. Then the kiss got serious all of a sudden, and Jim's hands got into the act, and Blair had to pull back a little, panting for breath. 

"Jim. _Jim._ We can't just keep having sex instead of working things out every time we get in an argument. Besides, I'm not eighteen anymore, man, and I don't think I can…" He tried to make Jim's hands behave themselves. "And _you're_ not a teenager anymore, either, and…" 

And hey, what do you know, apparently that didn't matter all that much. To either of them. Maybe Beach's pick-me-up had a delayed aphrodisiac effect along with its supposed psychoactive properties. 

Blair stopped trying to make Jim's hands behave themselves. "You know, if you really want to make things up to me, you can always do the thing with your —" 

Jim had one particular devilish smile that always sent every drop of blood in Blair's body directly to his groin in the space of about two heartbeats, and he smiled that smile now at Blair. "Mmm," he murmured into Blair's ear, as he got even busier with his hands. " _This_ thing, you mean?" 

Blair took in a sudden, extremely ragged breath, and cleared his throat. "That's… yeah. That's the one." 

Jim pulled his head back far enough to give Blair a look that made him shiver. "Your wish, my command, Chief," he said, and Jim didn't say things like that, even when he meant them. 

Okay, it wasn't like Blair didn't know how Jim felt about him, with or without words. But he really needed to get the recipe for that pick-me-up from Beach, for more reasons than just one. 

Jim's right hand shifted its teasing focus just a fraction, and Blair groaned. 

Later. He'd get the recipe from Beach later. 

Eventually. In a day or two, maybe. 

When he could think straight again. 

_If_ he could think straight again. 

  

****

**Blandings Castle. Still later Saturday night.  
(Or Sunday morning, depending on how you look at it.) **

Blair thumped Jim's ribcage lazily with the back of his hand. "So you're going to let me run some tests on you with Beach's pick-me-up, right?" he said. His voice was about as lazy as his ribcage-thump had been, and he couldn't find the energy to care. 

"I said I would, didn't I?" Jim answered, sounding as smugly wiped out as Blair felt. "And I hope you sufficiently appreciate my willingness to be your lab rat with this; that's as much of a peace offering as you're getting from me." 

Blair rolled his eyes, although he suspected the effect was mostly lost, since he was sitting with his back tugged up against Jim's chest and with Jim's chin resting on his shoulder. 

It was nice, sitting like this. They should get a headboard for their bed in the loft; they couldn't really sit like this at home, with the couch being too short for Jim to stretch out his legs and the loft railing not really cutting it as a headboard stand-in for the bed, even with pillows propped up against it. 

And okay, he was getting distracted. He pulled his mind back to the subject at hand — well, he pulled part of his mind back to the subject at hand; as much of his mind as was currently available and not hovering around uselessly in a haze of post-great-sex (post- _lots-_ of-great-sex) endorphins. "Actually, we're going to need to run some other tests once we're done with the pick-me-up-tests. Whether you want to or not," he told Jim. 

Jim's arms tightened a little around Blair's ribcage in a way that didn't feel even remotely related to a hug. "More tests? Have a heart, Sandburg. I'll pay my dues, but you're not dragging me into _more_ —" 

"Look, you had your hearing dialed down all yesterday, right? Didn't hear me trying to talk with you unless I was standing right there beside you? But you heard me say I wasn't ever going to have sex with you again, and I was halfway across the castle grounds from you at the time. Why _that_ got through…" 

"Huh," Jim said, and Blair felt him relax. "You want to run some tests involving me listening to you talk about sex?" Jim tugged gently on Blair's nipple ring. "Count me in, Chief. We might have to find a way to ship Glossop off somewhere first and deep-six Baxter so he doesn't end up butting in on our research, though, unless you want to wait until we're back in Cascade for your tests. Doesn't matter to me, but I know you don't want to leave before we've put in our time." 

He rubbed his chin along the top of Blair's shoulder, tickling Blair with the stubble on his jaw. "Tell you what," he added, "I'll stop bugging you so much about that. Or try to, anyway. I'm not going to lie to you; I'd rather be back in the Cascades, camping out near Bench Lake with you and getting a little fishing in. But with Penny out of the picture, at least we should be able to spend more time —" 

Blair sat up abruptly, and Jim stopped speaking with an _oof_ as Blair's elbow accidentally dug into his ribs. Leaving before they were supposed to? That reminded him… 

"Hey, I forgot to tell you," he said, absently patting the spot on Jim's ribs he'd just elbowed, "Naomi called this afternoon. Guess what?" 

  

**Blandings Castle. Earlier Saturday afternoon.**

Beach ushered Blair into the study and left, and Blair allowed himself ten seconds to enjoy the peaceful piglessness — and Glossoplessness and Baxterlessness and Lady-Constancelessness — of the room, then picked up the phone and said, "Hello?" 

"Blair, sweetie," Naomi's voice said into his ear, "I know you must be having a wonderful time and I don't want to interrupt that, but you're such a short distance away, and I need your help. Nigel drove off with everything, including my passport. He didn't mean to, I'm sure; he just didn't want to get involved in the protest." 

Naomi sighed. "Unfortunately, he seems to care more for his family's opinion than for standing up for what's right, at least in this case. Apparently one of his brothers is some kind of big deal in a fox-hunting club, and his father used to be a big deal, and Nigel was afraid they'd react badly if they thought he was joining a demonstration against fox-hunting. I really thought he was more principled than that." 

Crap, another demonstration? And its fallout? _Now?_ Blair rubbed his forehead. "Mom? Where are you? What's going on?" 

"Oh, hold on a moment, honey; the cop who arrested me wants to talk to me. I'll be right back." 

"Arrested?" Blair rubbed his forehead again, harder. "Naomi, where…" He trailed off as he heard Naomi talking to somebody else nearby, both voices growing more distant after a few moments. 

Okay, this was… actually, Blair didn't know what it was. 

Still, there was a silver lining: Lady Constance could tell Nigel whatever she wanted to about Blair's mental health or apparent lack thereof and it wouldn't matter now, not if Naomi wasn't _with_ Nigel anymore. 

And if Naomi had gotten arrested (and had _wanted_ to get arrested, or at least didn't mind getting arrested) her current campaign against cops might finally start winding down. Which meant that sometime in the foreseeable future he would be able to tell her about him and Jim. 

Things were looking up. Well, maybe they were looking up. At least there was a chance they were looking up. 

A voice that wasn't Naomi's intruded on Blair's thoughts, coming in loud and clear across the phone line even though the woman speaking wasn't (hopefully, anyway) talking to him. 

"— you young hellhound," the voice said vehemently, "what the devil have you gotten yourself into now, blast you?" 

"A trifling case of mistaken identity, Aged R.," another new voice answered. The guy the second new voice belonged to wasn't nearly as loud as the woman, and he sounded sort of soothingly cheerful. "I was scooped up in the net of justice by mere accident, an unfortunate matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time." 

"Isn't that the motto of your wasted life? But never mind that, why didn't you just fork over a fiver or whatever yourself, instead of disturbing me? I was having quite a pleasant afternoon until I got your message." 

"Sorry to disoblige, old ancestor," the guy said, still cheerfully. "Some high-spirited protest marcher apparently pinched my wallet, and with Jeeves off carousing with his aunt in Sheepscombe until tomorrow night, I had no choice." 

'Jeeves?' That sounded familiar… Wait, wasn't that the name of the originator of Beach's morning-after pick-me-up? 

"You could've bitten the bullet and spent the night in jug," the woman said, with what sounded like a censorious snort. "It would've done you a world of good." 

Of course, it could be some other Jeeves; England could very well be rife with Jeeveses. And Woosters. And Pongo Twistletons. And Bootsprockets… No, probably not Bootsprockets. Blair hoped not, anyway. 

"And miss one of Anatole's dinners?" Voice Number Two sounded shocked. " _Foie de Veau a la Lyonnaise_ tonight, isn't it? Besides, they've no place to put me; they were already full up with two overnight guests before Naomi and I were brought here in gyves." The sound of a throat being cleared came across the phone line. "That reminds me," Voice Two went on, "would you mind forking over for Naomi, too? She, like yours truly, is temporarily penniless, although her state of impecuniousness springs from mere accident rather than from an act of private enterprise." 

"'Naomi?' I assume you mean the woman Jenkins is chatting up in the corner over there?" The owner of Voice Number One sighed. "Please don't tell me you've gone and fallen in love with her, Bertie, you idiot; she looks nearly old enough to be your mother." 

"Contrary to popular opinion, Aunt Dahlia," Voice Number Two said, a little stiffly, "I don't fall in love with every person of the fair sex who crosses my path." 

"Just half of them, the half most likely to grind you into dust beneath their cloven hooves, chump that you are. Speaking of cloven hooves: I forgot to tell you that Lady Wickham's asked me to take Roberta off her hands for a bit, and the young she-devil should be putting into harbor this evening at some point." Voice Number One — belonging to an Aunt Dahlia, apparently — paused, and Blair could hear what sounded almost like a series of flustered bleats coming from the background as the voice continued, "Although where Lady Wickham gets the idea that she can ship her daughter off to Brinkley Court for a spot of exile anytime she disgraces herself —" 

Voice Number Two (a.k.a. Bertie) cut off Voice Number One with a squeak. "Bobbie? Bobbie's going to be staying at Brinkley Court? You'd better lock up your frogs and your hot-water bottles posthaste, Aged R. Did I ever tell you about the incident with Tuppy Glossop and the hot water bottles, from which I barely escaped with my life? Or about the time she decided to put a plague of frogs into the butler's —" 

"Yes, well, I suppose it's the red hair," Voice Number One interrupted, sounding philosophical. "Gives her ideas. It can't be helped, though. I need her mother's goodwill; she's writing an article for _Milady's Boudoir_ gratis." 

"What is it that Jeeves says? 'This fearful con-something-or-dashed-other of circumstances'? Involves cats, I think. Possibly kittens," Voice Number Two said gloomily. "But I say, Aunt Dahlia, if you're throwing Brinkley Court wide open, would you mind sparing a rusk of bread and a cot in the corner for Naomi once you've paid her fine? She doesn't have a bean at the moment and no place to lay her head, what with her friend haring off with all her worldly possessions." 

"Hmm." There was a suspicious note in Voice Number One's voice that Rupert Baxter might've envied. "What was this protest march about, anyway? If I invite her, am I likely to find myself assassinated in my sleep because she belongs to some society allergic to the existence of magazine publishers? Or a league violently opposed to retired fox hunters? What was she protesting?" 

There was a brief pause. "Oh, this and that," Voice Number Two said evasively. "This and that. Nothing to be bothered about." 

"Hmm," Voice Number One said again. "Can't she stay here? There's a perfectly good chair right over there against the wall. Sleeping sitting up is supposed to be good for the circulation; I'm sure I read that somewhere." 

"This ungenerous spirit doesn't become you, Aunt Dahlia." Voice Number Two — Bertie — sounded reproving. "For an aunt whose benevolence and bonhomie have always previously been shining beacons in the otherwise soul-shriveling wasteland of the Wooster nearest and dearest, your current inhospitable attitude is hardly —" 

A gusty sigh interrupted Bertie's rebuke, and Voice Number One said, resignedly, "Oh, all right. Bung her in, her and anybody else who happens to occur to either of you. _Mi casa es su casa."_

'Wooster?' So it probably _was_ the Jeeves of Beach's pick-me-up. Small world. 

Maybe Beach would be open to providing another one of those pick-me-ups this afternoon; Blair could use a new perspective on life right about now, and the pick-me-up had that in spades (temporarily, anyway), even when you weren't hung over. 

A few moments later, Bertie spoke again, but from too far away for the words to be clear. Blair thought he heard Naomi's voice answering, but he couldn't be entirely sure. He wasn't left in suspense for very long; the next voice he heard was definitely Naomi's, and she was definitely back in place at her end of the phone line. 

"Blair?" she said, sounding as carefree as only Naomi could sound after finding herself both passport- and- possession-less in a foreign country, then getting arrested. "I've been offered a place to stay for the night by these lovely people. But since you're nearby already, sweetheart, it really would help me straighten things out faster if you could swing by here in the morning. Nigel probably won't notice that he's still got my things for days; he's the epitome of an absent-minded professor. No offence, sweetie." 

"Of course not, Mom. But —" 

"We were on our way to visit his sister in Dorset, so I'm sure that's where he headed when he drove off. Unfortunately, I don't know his sister's last name or the name of the village she lives in. It's somewhere not too far north of Dorchester, though; I remember Nigel telling me that, and if you'll drive me down there, I'm sure we can find his sister and track him down." 

She gave an airy laugh. "I know we'll have fun, and you can bring Jim if you want to. I'll be staying at Brinkley Court in Market Snodsbury; you can pick me up there — and Blair, you _must_ meet Bertie. He's got the most interesting aura." 

Blair chewed his lip thoughtfully. Okay, on the one hand: Blandings Castle, with its vanishing (if not vanishing quickly enough) subculture of (presumably) ticked-off Lord Emsworths and (undoubtedly) ticked-off Lady Constances and (doubly undoubtedly) ticked-off Rupert Baxters and (probably not ticked-off but unflatteringly concerned about Blair's mental health) Sir Rodericks. And pigs. 

On the other hand: somewhere else, somewhere that was peopled with none of the above and that was (hopefully) likely to be refreshingly pig-free. 

He and Jim could pack their bags, sneak out in the morning before anybody else got up, rent a car, and get the heck out of here. Stop by Brinkley Court, meet Bertie and his aura and his Aunt Dahlia, pick up Naomi, get her reunited with her missing stuff, drop her off somewhere afterwards if she didn't want to stick around with Nigel, and chill. They still had more than a week left of their vacation, after all; days they could spend piglessly — not to mention Penelopelessly — 

And peacefully. _Sanely._ Brinkley Court and Aunt Dahlia and Bertie sounded like a good start on the whole peace-and-sanity thing. 

Right. "No problem, Naomi," Blair said cheerfully. "We'll see you in the morning." 

Things were definitely looking up. 


End file.
